Emily Behar, PhD, MS, graduated from the PhD program at IGHS in 2019 as America was in the throes of the opioid overdose crisis. That year, nearly 50,000 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses.
Behar, a long-time harm reductionist who had worked for years at the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Center on Substance Use and Health, decided to pursue her doctoral degree to gain the technical skills she needed to continue her work. “I wanted to understand how my work fits into the big picture of global and local public health,” Behar said.
Though much of the research that happens at IGHS is international, Behar said she was particularly interested in preventing overdose deaths domestically. “Global health does not mean that it needs to take place outside of the United States,” she said, “America is part of the global world as well.”
As soon as she graduated, Behar began working to curb America’s overdose crisis. She became the vice president of clinical operations at Ophelia, a telehealth company that provides online medicated assisted treatment for opioid use disorder. Behar said that during her time in the IGHS PhD program, she learned critical skills in theory, statistics and epidemiology, which she uses daily.
Ophelia’s treatments are sorely needed— according to recent data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2023, there were 5.7 million people in America with an opioid use disorder, and only 18 percent of them had received medication-assisted therapy within the last year. Ophelia quickly links patients to providers who can prescribe common medications that can help treat substance use disorder, like suboxone, thereby preventing overdose deaths.
“Ophelia operates on the principles of health equity and democratizing access to treatment, so people can get the medication they need no matter where they live or how busy they are,” Behar said.
The lessons she learned at IGHS taught her how to center health equity when working with vulnerable and diverse populations, which is often her clientele base. “When you’re on the streets of Philadelphia, sometimes it can be hard to remember that you’re in one of the richest countries on earth,” she said. “I think even people who work domestically can benefit from learning a global framework and understanding the bigger issues in public health.”