Joan Kaufman

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Joan Kaufman has been working in the health, gender, and development fields for more than twenty years. Most recently, she has been the Ford Foundation’s Gender and Reproductive Health Program Officer in China. In that capacity, she furthered Ford’s program supporting the Chinese feminist movement, initiating Chinese population policy reform and mobilizing a response to China’s emerging AIDS epidemic. Kaufman has published widely on women’s health issues in China, Nigeria, and the US.

Kaufman will concentrate on several writing projects while at Radcliffe, including a sequel to her book A Billion and Counting: Family Planning in China (San Francisco Press, 1983). The sequel will focus on the recent history of China’s population policy and program, against a backdrop of new international agreements concerning this area and China's own burgeoning women’s activist community. Kaufman’s other writing projects will include articles on China’s AIDS epidemic, the gender impact of health sector reform, and the Chinese women’s movement.

Kaufman earned her PhD in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. She received a Rockefeller Foundation doctoral fellowship in 1986 and research grants from the Ford Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, and other private and government donors over the last twenty years. She previously worked for the United Nations Population Fund.