HUMANITARIANISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY
James Maskalyk, Medicine, University of Toronto
Coach House, Green College, UBC
Tuesday March 24 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm with reception to follow
James Maskalyk is an author, physician, and humanitarian, who has worked in many different health systems around the world. He will discuss principles of humanitarianism, diminishing margins of safety in its action, and how lessons from the Ebola intervention might be used to prevent such epidemics from recurring. Using his ongoing work in Ethiopia as an example, he will discuss how institutional partnerships between high- and low-income nations can reduce the need for humanitarian intervention.
James Maskalyk is the author of the bestselling book Six Months in Sudan. He practises emergency medicine at St. Michael’s, Toronto’s inner-city hospital, and is an award-winning teacher at the University of Toronto, an associate and founding editor of the open access medical journal Open Medicine, and director of TAAAC(EM), a program that works with Ethiopian partners at Addis Ababa University to train East Africa’s first emergency physicians.
He is a member of Médecins Sans Frontières, an organization for which he has worked as both a journalist and a physician, most recently in Dadaab Kenya, home to the world’s largest refugee camp. He was MSF’s first official blogger, and is working on his second book, Life on the Ground Floor, due out from Doubleday Canada in 2016. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Green College.
