Social Medicine Consortium Co-Founders

Michelle Morse, MD, MPH

Dr. Morse is Founding Co-Director of EqualHealth and Assistant Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  Dr. Morse co-founded EqualHealth (www.equalhealth.org), an organization that aims to inspire and support the development of Haiti's next generation of healthcare leaders through transforming medical and nursing education and creating opportunities for Haitian health professionals to thrive. She works to strengthen medical education globally, expand the teaching of social medicine in the US and abroad, and to support health systems strengthening through EqualHealth.  In 2015 Dr. Morse worked with several partners to found the Social Medicine Consortium, a global coalition of over 700 people representing over 50 universities and organizations in twelve countries, which seeks to use activism and disruptive pedagogy rooted in the practice and teaching of social medicine to address the miseducation of health professionals on the root causes of illness.  In 2018, Dr. Morse was named as a Soros Equality Fellow and will be working on a global Campaign Against Racism during the fellowship.

Dr. Morse is an internal medicine hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) through the Division of Global Health Equity, an instructor on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and an affiliate of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.  She served as Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Partners in Health (PIH) from 2013 to 2016.  She also served as an advisor to the Medical Director of Mirebalais Hospital, a newly built public academic medical center established through a partnership between the government of Haiti and PIH.  Previously, she served as Director of Medical Education at Mirebalais Hospital, where she started the hospital’s first three residency programs.

Michael Westerhaus, MD, MA

Dr. Michael Westerhaus is a co-founder of the Social Medicine Consortium. He is an internal medicine primary care physician at the Center for International Health in St. Paul, MN, which provides care to refugees and immigrants. As a member of the Global Health Faculty at the University of Minnesota, he works both in Minnesota and in northern Uganda to improve community-based primary care delivery, teach about the social determinants of health, and build partnerships based upon respect and equality that advance health for all. He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 2006 and completed the Global Health Equity residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2010. He also received a Master’s in medical anthropology from Harvard University in 2005 and currently conducts ethnographic research on primary care delivery, global health, and the intersection of structural forces with the personal lives of patients and health workers.