The PhD program in global health draws on the premise that sustainable and satisfying solutions to the most pressing global health challenges require a sophisticated understanding of how cultural context, social and ecological processes, and disease are really related.<br><br>The transdisciplinary graduate program trains students broadly in cutting-edge health social science research theory and methods. The program leverages the strength of ASU's medical anthropology programming and 15 medical anthropologists, and it has the advantage of accessing a much wider set of skills offered by those in such fields as medical sociology, demography, human geography and epidemiology. It is designed to train those who anticipate working in transdisciplinary academic settings, medical schools or nonacademic health settings, such as the commercial sector, government agencies or nongovernmental organizations.<br><br>The concentration in culture and health provides focused, specialized training in theories and methods for researching the relationship between culture and health. This concentration utilizes the perspectives of medical anthropology and sophisticated ethnographic methods to study and interpret the role of cultural and social differences in shaping health. Students investigate these methods in the context of the community-based, participatory approaches that tend to promote the most mutually meaningful and lasting health solutions. Graduates are thus particularly prepared for leadership in addressing health disparities in cross-cultural settings and with the most vulnerable populations. This includes very complex, difficult settings where particularly nuanced and sophisticated (often anthropological) understandings of health-related challenges are needed.