Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies

Craig Spencer, MD, MPH is an emergency medicine physician and associate professor of the practice of health services, policy and practice at Brown University School of Public Health. With more than a decade of experience in humanitarian response, he has worked in Africa and Southeast Asia as a field epidemiologist on numerous projects examining access to medical care and human rights, including measuring mortality and maternal health in Burundi, child separation in emergencies in D.R. Congo and South Sudan, hepatitis E surveillance and response in Chad, and coordinating Doctors Without Borders’ (MSF) national epidemiological response in Guinea during the Ebola outbreak. In addition to his international public health work, Craig has provided medical care in the Caribbean, Central America, West and East Africa, and most recently abroad onboard a MSF medical search and rescue boat in the Mediterranean. He has taught public health and humanitarian response at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and created a course on the lessons unlearned in humanitarian response, looking at the sector from an historical lens. In 2019, he was elected to the Board of Directors for Doctors Without Borders USA.