Current Position and Past Experience
Lise Saffran is the Director of the Master of Public Health Program at the University of Missouri, where she teaches public health planning and study abroad in Ghana, West Africa. She has a particular interest in narrative in public health and her work on that topic has included a seminar for health workers in Togo,West Africa at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Lomé and the recent publication of the article Only Connect: the case for public health humanities in the journal Medical Humanities. She has extensive field experience in national and international nonprofit and governmental organizations dedicated to public health and education, including serving as the Director of Education for Planned Parenthood of the Capital and Coast in Raleigh North Carolina and as a systems development specialist for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.

Education, Honors and Achievements
Saffran holds an MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Hedgebrook Community of Writers. She earned undergraduate degrees from the University of Oregon, Eugene in German and International Studies, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Personal Details and Community Involvement
In addition to her academic work, Saffran is a published novelist, essayist and short-story writer. Her first novel, Juno’s Daughters came out in 2011. She is on the Board of Directors for the Teen Pregnancy and Prevention Partnership in St. Louis and the Missouri Review.