Our Staff

Professor Sabina Rashid, PhD, is currently Professor, Mushtaque Chowdhury Chair in Health and Poverty (Endowed by the late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, Founder of BRAC) and was former Dean (2013-2023), at the BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is a Medical Anthropologist (BA, Master's, PhD) from the Australian National University and joined the school in 2004.

Professor Rashid’s research critiques dominant biomedical paradigms by centring lived experiences and structural factors that shape the health and lives of disadvantaged populations. She has institutionalised a culture of critical, ethnographic, and participatory research within public health. Over the last 25 years, she has developed a robust ethnographic and qualitative research portfolio that unpacks how gender, poverty, urban precarity, and social exclusion intersect to affect the lives, health and well-being of families, particularly residents of urban settlements, women, marginalised populations, climate-affected migrants and adolescents in Bangladesh. Before her association with the School, she contributed her expertise to the research division at BRAC, the health unit at UNICEF, Bangladesh, and Grameen Trust, a sister organisation of Grameen Bank.

Professor Rashid is actively involved in teaching, capacity building, and training. In 2008, she founded the Centre of Excellence for Gender, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and co-established the Centre of Excellence for Urban Equity and Health in 2013. Both centres prioritise evidence-based approaches to influence policies and programs, sharing evidence from the Global South on national, regional, and global platforms to ensure approaches remain contextually relevant and suitable for diverse settings. She is dedicated to fostering meaningful institutional partnerships between the North and South for intellectual engagement, knowledge, and capacity sharing among academics, researchers, and practitioners nationally, regionally, and globally.

In the area of education and decolonial approaches, Professor Rashid co-authored an article, Designing Transformative Public Health Education for the Developing World: How One Course Re-imagined a More Indigenous MPH, Salud Publica Mex. 2022;64:569-575, (https://doi.org/10.21149 /13215), and in the aftermath of the pandemic, “Public Health Education Post Covid-19: A Proposal for Critical Revisions, BMJ Glob Health, 2021 Apr; 6(4):e005669. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-00566. She has also challenged the public health disease-centric model and published on expanding the notion of what health and risks mean for impoverished communities: “A Socially Just Model: Balancing Hunger and Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Bangladesh, BMJ Global Health 2020; 5: e002715. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-002715.  She was invited to contribute to an edited collection on Health Governance for the Global Governance Project, for G7 and G20 in 2022. 

Professor Rashid is an Honorary Professor, International Health, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, November 2023-2026. In February 2025, she was appointed to the prestigious position of Senior Research Fellow, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies. It is a public research organisation that conducts policy research on development issues in Bangladesh for a period of three years.

In 2018, Professor Rashid received “Heroines of Health” award by GE Healthcare and Women in Global Health, presented to her at a ceremony during the World Health Organization's general assembly in Geneva for her work and dedication to vulnerable population in Bangladesh. Her leadership has been featured in the World Health Organisation Bulletin, Geneva in 2019 (https://cutt.ly /93pJB0l) and in 2022 in the edited collection, Women and Global Health Leadership, Springer, Cham. https://cutt.ly/c3p6aII, and was featured in Lancet Perspectives Profile, Volume 405, Issue 10472, p 19, January 04, 2025, “Sabina Faiz Rashid: Building Social Justice in Public Health”, by Arathi Prasad.