About

Michele Barry is the Senior Associate Dean for Global Health, a Professor of Medicine, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute at Stanford University. She is part of the Department of Medicine within the Stanford School of Medicine. Her research interests include global health workforce, clinical tropical medicine, emerging infectious diseases, problems of underserved populations, and the impact of globalization upon health in the developing world. Barry's work focuses on addressing health disparities and improving health outcomes in various countries, including Liberia, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. She is actively involved in global health initiatives and academic programs aimed at producing knowledge in and of Africa, and she contributes to the university's efforts in global health education and research.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Geography
• Ecology
• Economics
• Environmental health
• Computer Science
• Environmental science
• Biology
• Environmental planning
• Virology
• Sociology
• Agroforestry
• Criminology
• Public relations
• Forestry
• Waste management
• Engineering
• Economic growth
• Pathology
• Internal medicine
• Law
• Development economics
• Business

Selected publications

• Women’s Unique Health Needs and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Meeting Report from the 79th United Nations General Assembly Science Summit

  Journal of Women s Health · 2025-09-11

  articleOpen access

  Biological sex, hormones, and gender uniquely affect health and disease, often resulting in disparities for women across the lifespan and from different racial and ethnic groups, geographical locations, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Without intentional investment and infrastructure to support good health and wellbeing for women, half of the world's population remains vulnerable to preventable morbidity and mortality. The Society for Women's Health Research and ECHAlliance-The Global Health Connector convened a women's health program as part of the 10th Annual Science Summit during the United Nations 79th General Assembly. This hybrid event was held in New York, NY, (USA) and virtually in September 2024. The program entitled "Women's Unique Health Needs and the Sustainable Development Goals" comprised a series of discussions about preventive care, policy infrastructure, and workforce inclusivity to promote advancements in women's health care, research, leadership, and policymaking to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. This report highlights key points from each session and opportunities to engage in efforts to close the global gender health gap.

  PublisherDOI

• Correction: Leveraging deep learning models to increase the representation of nomadic pastoralists in health campaigns and demographic surveillance

  PLOS Global Public Health · 2025-12-31

  articleOpen access

  [This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0004018.].

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cities and environmental change

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-02-14

  book-chapterSenior author

  Over half of the Earth’s human population is currently crammed into an estimated one to three percent of the planet’s surface, and the trend is likely to continue. This chapter explores the particular environmental challenges for planetary health that come with the urban concentration of humanity. It provides an overview of climate and health threats faced by urban residents and outlines an array of possible solutions, ranging from transport infrastructure to the built environment to food systems to disaster resilience, applicable to urban settings overall and especially to megacities, which come with an added degree of heterogeneity and complexity. Yet for cities to successfully adapt to the dynamic set of climate and health risks is by no means guaranteed. The authors conclude, however, that with vision, boldness, creativity, and commitment to working in partnership across stakeholder groups, it is entirely possible to realize urban environments which both meet human health needs and demands of sustainability.

  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging deep learning models to increase the representation of nomadic pastoralists in health campaigns and demographic surveillance

  PLOS Global Public Health · 2025-04-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Nomadic pastoralists are systematically underrepresented in the planning of health services and frequently missed by health campaigns due to their mobility. Previous studies have developed novel geospatial methods to address these challenges but rely on manual techniques that are too time and resource-intensive to scale on a national or regional level. To address this gap, we developed a computer vision-based approach to automatically locate active nomadic pastoralist settlements from satellite imagery. We curated labeled datasets of satellite images capturing approximately 1,000 historically active settlements in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia and the Samburu County of Kenya to train and evaluate deep learning models, studying their robustness to low spatial resolutions and limits in labeled training data. Using a novel training strategy that leveraged public road and water infrastructure data, we closed performance gaps introduced by shortages in labeled settlement data. We deployed our best model on a region spanning 5,400 square kilometers in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia, resulting in the identification of historical settlements with a 270-fold reduction in manual review volume. Our work serves as a promising framework for automating the localization of nomadic pastoralist settlements at a national scale for health campaigns and demographic surveillance.

  PublisherDOI

• Cities, health, and equity

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-02-14 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Today, 55 percent of the global population - over four billion people - live in urban settings. By 2050, this number will rise to nearly 70 percent, with almost 90 percent of urban growth occurring on the Asian and African continents and in lower-income countries. This chapter considers the chief benefits for, but also structural limitations and threats to health associated with living in urban metropolises. Particular risk factors arise in connection with population density, heat islands effects, pollution, limited green space , and stationary work. Resulting health threats include both infectious and non-communicable diseases, as well as mental health and cognitive risks. The chapter concludes with a perspective on the rising urban equity crisis manifest in discrimination patterns and inequality in access to fair standards of housing. Recognising cities’ socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental heterogeneity is a critical factor in developing responses to urban development challenges and achievement of SDGs in urban contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• The AI Frontier in Humanitarian Aid — Embracing Possibilities and Addressing Risks

  New England Journal of Medicine · 2025-10-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Male Allyship to Advance Women’s Global Health Leadership in the Academy

  medRxiv · 2025-09-21

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Women are underrepresented in leadership positions within global health. Although women leaders have been shown to foster inclusive work environments and prioritize improvements in women’s health, they face barriers to their advancement, including microaggressions and disproportionate caregiving responsibilities. Male allyship can facilitate the elevation of women into global health leadership roles. This study explores the experiences of global health leaders in academia on male allyship and identifies actions and best practices to support the growth of women’s leadership in global health. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-one global health leaders (11 females, 10 males) from U.S. and Canadian academic institutions. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded utilizing a combined inductive-deductive approach. Participants identified barriers and outlined potential approaches to support women’s advancement to leadership roles. For the individual male ally, recommendations included completing a self-assessment (to mitigate counterproductive behaviors and biases), engaging in effective mentorship practices, advocating publicly, and serving as a positive role model. Recommendations at the institutional level emphasize the importance of cultivating an enabling environment that facilitates open dialogue, establishing goals and metrics; and implementing allyship training with periodic evaluation. At the societal level, participants suggested promoting early education and shared caregiving to shift cultural norms on gender roles. This paper provides a framework of actions and resources to cultivate and support male allyship for women’s leadership advancement in global health. Effective male allyship begins with acknowledging power dynamics and an understanding of how intersectionality, beyond gender alone, shapes women’s careers and workplace dynamics. Additionally, mentorship and collaborative peer support are critical to promoting women’s career development. Individual allyship when combined with institutional and societal actions and policies, can facilitate the advancement of women in global health leadership roles.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Environmental Determinants of Health—Time to Redefine the Social History?

  JAMA · 2024-10-03 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  This Viewpoint discusses how increasing climate change and other environmental hazards contribute to greater adverse health effects, particularly for socially vulnerable populations, and calls for improved gathering of social and environmental history data and risk assessment in routine patient encounters.

  PublisherDOI

• Extreme heat and cardiovascular mortality among structurally marginalized populations in the United States: A scoping review

  The Journal of Climate Change and Health · 2024-09-07 · 4 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Introduction: Extreme heat and heat waves have long been recognized as a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease exacerbations and death. Differential outcomes among structurally marginalized populations are less well understood, and in particular, the impact of this environmental hazard on cardiac mortality deserves further exploration for these populations. Methods: A scoping review was conducted to characterize the scientific literature examining the impact of extreme heat on cardiovascular mortality among structurally marginalized populations in the United States. Using relevant medical subject headings (MeSH) and key terms, a systematic search of the indexing databases of Pubmed, Embase, and Web of Science for English-language manuscripts published from inception to July 2023 for primary research, systematic reviews, meta analyses, and narrative reviews was performed. Results: 4674 articles were screened, of which 33 which met inclusion criteria. The majority (73 %) of these were primary quantitative research studies, all of which were observational in nature. Half of the research designs were cohort studies. The most common marginalized group described was that of older adults (79 % of manuscripts), while race/ethnicity (42 %), sex/gender (42 %), and lower socioeconomic status (49 %) were also commonly explored. Most studies assessed aggregated composite cardiovascular mortality as the primary end point, with only four fractionating myocardial ischemia/infarction as the cause of death. Conclusions: Future directions of study for the field include additional analyses of other marginalized groups including differently-abled, immigrant, outdoor laborers, incarcerated peoples, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, and Asian American/Pacific Islander populations, as well as determining the impact of diverse socioeconomic parameters, and examining disaggregated cardiac outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Climate change and inequality

  Pediatric Research · 2024-06-24 · 39 citations

  reviewOpen access

  This review explores how climate change is manifesting along existing lines of inequality and thus further exacerbating current health disparities with a particular focus on children and future generations. Climate change risk and vulnerability are not equally distributed, nor is the adaptive capacity to respond to its adverse effects, which include health consequences, economic impacts, and displacement. Existing lines of inequality are already magnifying the adverse effects of climate change. Today's children and future generations will experience a disproportionate number of adverse climate events than prior generations, especially children in lower-income populations, communities of color, and Indigenous communities. In order to mitigate the crisis of inequity accompanying the climate crisis, systemic action must be taken on a global scale - with a focus on protecting children and future generations, and in empowering youth-led environmental activism and engagement in climate policy. IMPACT STATEMENT: Our review offers a current summary of the ways in which inequality is manifesting with respect to climate change in children and future generations. Rather than use a systematic review, we opted to use a theoretical framework to guide our review. We divided the effects of climate change into three effect pathways: via disruptions in (i) climate and weather, (ii) ecosystems, and (iii) society. By dividing our review in this theoretical framework, we can better suggest targeted public health interventions at each effect level. Furthermore, we are able to successfully identify literature gaps and areas of future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R25TW009338

  NIH · $5.2M · 2018

Frequent coauthors

• Andrew Y. Chang

  Stanford University

  29 shared

• Fritz Vögtle

  29 shared

• Matthew H. Bonds

  Harvard University

  23 shared

• Hisashi Yamamoto

  20 shared

• Erika Veidis

  Center for Innovation

  19 shared

• Susanne H. Sokolow

  15 shared

• Britt Wray

  14 shared

• Andrés Garchitorena

  13 shared

Labs

• Center for Innovation in Global HealthPI