Joining Forces
Global One Health degree set to welcome students from many disciplines.
One Health is a way of considering the world through interdisciplinary perspectives to solve health problems that happen when animals, humans and plants interact in our ecosystems. It’s a framework that NC State is primed to embrace with its strong focus on agriculture, plants and animal health. So it makes sense that in 2022 the university opened the Global One Health Academy, under the leadership of Executive Director Siddhartha “Sid” Thakur ’05 PHD, to take on existing and anticipated health challenges, such as clean water or the spread of a virus that arises, like COVID.
Now, the university is going a step further by offering a new Master of Science in Global One Health (MS-GOH), which is unique to NC State. “Most of the other degrees that provide either doctoral- or master’s-level training in One Health are part of a school of public health or part of some other degree,” says Michael Reiskind, an entomologist who is graduate program director for the MS-GOH working along with Meredith Spence Beaulieu ’11, ’19 PHD, university program manager for the academy.
The program, starting in fall 2026 through the Global One Health Academy, aims to welcome 20 students from an array of academic backgrounds — from engineering to entomology to literature — in the initial class, eventually building to a total of 40 students during any academic year. It will also feature a research-focused thesis or a nonthesis track, offering an alternative for those who will enter the workforce with nonprofits, industry or government.
The two-year degree will stress six competencies, including ethical practices and team science, all coalescing to capitalize on a One Health framework. “It’s about considering the connections between things and considering the many connections that we have yet to discover,” Reiskind says. “We’d like to be able to anticipate those so that we can avoid negative effects down the road.”
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