Professor Ans Irfan is a public health pracademic, educator, and multidisciplinary scientist with more than two decades of experience advancing health equity across domestic and international contexts. His work spans the United States, Pakistan, China, and Portugal, integrating global experience with a systems-level understanding of how public health knowledge becomes public health practice. His scholarship and leadership center on health equity, climate and health, social policy, technology, and learning innovation.
His scholarship and practice bring together climate justice, global health, environmental and occupational health, health policy, migrant health, decolonial theory, sociocultural anthropology, organizational change, implementation science, program development, and program evaluation. Grounded in mixed-methods inquiry and shaped by the realities of practice, his work focuses on designing public policy and programmatic interventions that address the structural conditions driving social and health inequities.
Dr. Irfan is the founding director of The Public Health Praxis Center, an applied public health ecosystem devoted to research translation, leadership development, capacity building, and science communication. Through the Center, he has developed programs that prepare scholars, practitioners, and institutions to turn science into social impact. These include the Praxis Fellowship, the Science for Social Impact Award, and the Inclusive Health Equity Literacy Scholarship. His global initiatives have included the ClimatexHealth Technical Assistance Initiative, which supports climate-health adaptation work, and the Climate & Health Equity Practice Fellowship, a pioneering program that develops climate and health leadership among physicians in the Global South.
Beyond the academy, Professor Irfan has advised and collaborated with national and global institutions on climate and health equity, environmental health, evidence-informed policymaking, science translation, and public health capacity building, including UNESCO’s Inclusive Policy Lab, the American Public Health Association’s Center for Climate, Health & Equity, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He also serves as a Fulbright Specialist, a CFR Higher Education Ambassador with the Council on Foreign Relations, a Senior Fellow with the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Fellowship, and a climate expert with the Lancet Countdown U.S. Brief Working Group. He has also served as a Climate Security Fellow with the Center for Climate & Security at the Council on Strategic Risks.
His science-policy experience includes service as a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences, where he contributed to consensus studies on sexual and gender minority well-being, rising midlife mortality (‘deaths of despair’), and socioeconomic disparities. He also co-led an institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion assessment initiative at the Academies. He is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar, an affiliate of Harvard Innovation Labs and the Harvard Climate Entrepreneurs’ Circle, and a founding member and former Policy & Programming Director of the National Association for Doctors of Public Health. His recent work also includes service as a Social Science Fellow in Education and Workforce Development with the U.S. Department of Energy, through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Policy Fellowship program.