A young girl, Bata, holds a sign advertising the free reproductive health services offered by Likhaan Center at the World Pop Day Reproductive Health Fair. Bixby Intern Heidi Tuason spent her summer with Likhaan as the Reproductive Health Research, Policy, & Advocacy intern, where she worked on various projects including: assisting in the collection and analysis of women’s stories of illegal and unsafe abortion and conducting interviews with community health workers, community leaders and Likhaan staff about reproductive health issues during regular site visits to communities. Photo By Heidi Tuason.

Bixby Intern Heidi Tuason is presenting on her internship

“Advocating for reproductive health in the Philippines”
Decemeber 12,
12-1pm
17 D University Hall

Bixby Intern Heidi Tuason spent her summer with Likhaan as the Reproductive Health Research, Policy, & Advocacy intern, where she worked on various projects including: assisting in the collection and analysis of women’s stories of illegal and unsafe abortion and conducting interviews with community health workers, community leaders and Likhaan staff about reproductive health issues during regular site visits to communities.

The awards will be presented December 4th, at a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Other award winners:

Michelle Goldberg, an investigative journalist, will receive the Best Bookaward for her book The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. Her book explores the global battle over women’s reproductive rights, looking at the evolution of the conversation over the years.

Robert Engelmanof the Worldwatch Institute will be honored with the award for Best Article or Series of Articles for his article “Population & Sustainability,” which appeared in Scientific American. The article summarizes the current state of world population and its linkages to sustainability and climate change, while also discussing the likelihood of slowing global population growth.

The Associated Press will be awarded Best News Service for its news and analyses of events occurring around the world that can have an impact on the high fertility rate in some of the world’s poorest countries and the effects that the growing population can have on the environment.

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) will receive the award for Best Online News Service for their blog “Optimum Population Trust News Watch.” The blog contains not only OPT’s press releases, but excerpts from news stories and links to those stories that are related to the causes, consequences, and remedies of population growth.

New Security Beat by the Environmental Change and Security Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars will be awarded Best Online Commentary for its posts on international population issues and their links to the environment, international development, foreign policy, and peace and conflict.

Earth Days will receive the award for Best Film or Miniseries. The film looks at the history of the environmental movement from its early post war beginnings in the 1950s to the publication of Silent Spring to the first Earth Day in 1970 and the action that followed. The film pays special attention to the early links between the environmental and population movements.

The Local Government Chairman, an editorial cartoon in the Nigerian Observernewspaper by Francis Umendu Odupute, will be honored with the award for Best Editorial Cartoon. This cartoon depicts the struggle Nigeria has had in getting political leaders to acknowledge that population growth has had many significant consequences. This is especially important since Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa.

PBS’s To the Contrary with Bonnie Erbe will be recognized as the Best TV Show. To the Contrary with Bonnie Erbe devoted a special episode entirely to the history of the relationship between the environmental movement and population stabilization, beginning with environmental groups embracing population stabilization as a goal on the first Earth Day, through to what has led many groups to drop the issue completely.

EarthSky: A Clear Voice for Sciencewill receive the award for Best Radio Show for their series of weekly interviews with scientists around the world. Their interviews have included a series of interviews with population experts addressing a range of population related issues.

Neighbors, a radio serial drama focusing on population and family planning in Uganda, will receive the Best Serial Drama award. Neighbors is a short serial drama whose storyline illustrates the problems of having a large family and the advantages of a small planned family.

John Feeney will be honored with the Media Outreach Award for his contribution to educating the media and the public regarding population growth and its public policy implications through the Global Population Speakout.

For more information contact:
Jennie Wetter
Program Manager
The Population Institute
Phone: (202) 544-3300 ext 108
Fax: (202) 544-0068
E-mail: jwetter@populationinstitute.org

A discussion session will follow with a lively debate among speakers and participants on:

-what participants’ countries are doing about high mortality rates and reproductive rights

-the appropriate and inappropriate roles for governments

Global Health Leadership Forum: An International Executive Program to Rethink Health Policy and Health Systems Change–Applications are currently being accepted for the Berkeley and Barcelona 2010 sessions. Deadline for Berkeley session: October 30, 2009

Berkeley, CA: January 10-16, 2010

Barcelona, Spain: June 27-July 3, 2010

The Global Health Leadership Forum is an offering from the University of California Berkeley in conjunction with the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. The program is a unique certificate-based international health program focusing on key health policy and management issues in an intimate discussion setting.

The Population and MDGs DeCal will feature guest speakers whose work focuses on a particular MDG each week. We will learn about these various interdisciplinary perspectives and discuss how the population growth factor underlies each one.

This DeCal will be supervised by Professor Malcolm Potts and the School of Public Health

For more information contact: pmdgdecal@gmail.com

By providing high quality learning modules on a wide variety of topics which students can review either on their own or in instructor-led courses, The Global Health Education Consortium hopes to improve the quality and efficiency of global health education. The Bixby Center was pleased to help with this important mission.

Bixby Modules:
“Demographic transition and its causes: what reduces fertility”
“Population growth and population policy: Is Population a Problem?”

“The ultimate weapon of mass destruction-and perhaps of economic destruction-is the testosterone molecule,” quipped Malcolm Potts at the February 11, 2009, discussion of his new book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains War and Offers a Path to Peace, which explores the pivotal question, “Why do human beings systematically and deliberately kill our own species?” Potts, the Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, was joined Science magazine’s Ann Gibbons, a leading correspondent on human evoluation, who examined whether aggressive human behaviors are evolving in response to changing social structures.

Sex and War: How Biology Explains War and Offers a Path to Peace
featuring
Malcolm Potts, Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning,
School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley
Ann Gibbons, Correspondent, Science Magazine

Watch the full presenation here
Malcolm Potts at Woodrow Wilson Center

Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path or a Safer World traces the cultural and biological evolution of warfare from its prehuman origins to our own times. In the spirit of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden pull together insights from history, archaeology, psychology, and biology to produce a
clarifying new understanding of human history and current events.

Sex and War shows that war, terrorism, slavery, and the subjugation of women have common roots deep in our biological history. Evolution is not destiny, however, and the authors argue that relatively simple strategies can help the biology of peace win out over the biology of war. In doing so, they lay out a roadmap to make war less likely in the future, and less brutal when it does occur.

Malcolm Potts is the Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health.  During his distinguished career, he has served as president and CEO of Family Health International, as well as the first medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Ann Gibbons is the author of The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times best science and technology book in 2007. She is a correspondent for Science magazine, where she has written about human evolution for more than a decade. She has also taught science writing at Carnegie Mellon University and has written for many newspapers and magazines.