Fernando Simón, keynote speaker of an inaugural event at the University of Barcelona on global health and social inequalities

The keynote speaker at the event will be Fernando Simón (born in Zaragoza in 1963), an epidemiologist and director of the Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES) at the Spanish Ministry of Health since 2012. He is a professor at the National School of Public Health and a member of the Advisory Committee of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and served as the spokesperson for the Special Committee on Ebola Management in Spain in 2014 and was the public face of the Ministry of Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. His ability to communicate science in emergencies - and to defend epidemiological evidence in the face of political pressure - makes him one of the most authoritative voices in Spanish public health.

Following Simón's talk, there will be an open discussion and a reception with refreshments from 6.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. for all attendees.

Presentation of the Hub for Global Social Medicine

The event will also feature the presentation of the Hub for Global Social Medicine, the UB's new interdisciplinary and interinstitutional (co-sponsored by the URV and ISGlobal) research centre, established and directed by Seth M. Holmes, an ICREA researcher at the UB's Department of Social Anthropology. Holmes, who is also a Chancellor's Professor (2022 - 2025) at the University of California, Berkeley, has joined the UB through the ICREA programme - the Government of Catalonia's initiative to attract international research talent - at a time when the international scientific community is watching with growing concern the cuts to research funding and diversity driven by the Trump administration in the United States, which have accelerated the exodus of scientists to Europe.

Holmes is the author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (University of California Press, 2023), a multi-award-winning ethnographic study that has been translated into five languages and will be published in Catalan in late 2026 and examines the intersection of migration, agricultural labour and health in the United States. In addition, he led the series of social medicine case studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine from 2018 to 2020. As the first author of the introductory article in the new series in The Lancet, Holmes proposes a form of translational social medicine: each clinical case serves both as a diagnostic tool and as a case for structural intervention. The series is inspired by a classic question posed by international expert and epidemiologist Michael Marmot: "Why treat people and send them back to the conditions that make them sick?".

How do social inequalities affect health?

The conference will feature a presentation of the clinical case study Improvisation in contexts of infrastructural violence: a physician practising medicine in Sahrawi refugee camps, published in The Lancet (vol. 407, pp. 566-567) and presented by Salek Ali Mohamed Elabd, Raabub Mohamed-Lamin Mehdi and María Carrión. The case study describes everyday medical practice in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, where a doctor treats snake bites, complicated births and various emergencies without electricity or basic medical supplies: without gloves, bandages or splints. In this context, improvisation is not the exception, but the necessary norm.

The case powerfully illustrates how infrastructural violence - the precariousness imposed by decades of forced exile - shapes clinical practice and undermines the right to health of an entire community.

The event will also feature a presentation of the case study Social habitus: a factory worker in a stroke rehabilitation unit in France, by international expert medical social scientists Muriel Darmon and Mayssa Rekhis, published in The Lancet (vol. 407, pp. 1324-1325). The case concerns a 50-year-old factory worker with a history of migration, who suffered a frontal-lobe stroke and showed slow recovery and poor adherence to treatment in a hospital rehabilitation unit in urban France. The article concludes that the rehabilitation tools and protocols were at odds with the patient's social background - their social class, education, gender and life history - and that this mismatch had a negative impact on the process of diagnosis as well as therapeutic outcomes. The case study provides practical tools for taking patients' social diversity into account and tailoring treatments to their individual circumstances.

The event is organized by the Interinstitutional Hub for Global Social Medicine at the University of Barcelona (co-sponsored by the URV and ISGlobal), and receives institutional support from the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, the University of California Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, the Blavatnik Institute of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

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