Ans Irfan, MD, EdD, DrPH, MPH, MRPL is an Associate Professor at the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. He also serves as a Religion and Public Health Program Fellow at Harvard Divinity School.

Ans Irfan’s MRPL project, "Conceptualizing Religion as a Meta-Structural Determinant of Health," focused on the intersection of religion and public health by problematizing the notion of secularity which is a normative assumption in many of the policymaking ecosystems. He asserts that without questioning the role of religion, our capacity to fully grasp the nuanced, powerful, and complex role of religion as a positive and negative macro-level structural determinant of health is limited. In this webinar, he will explore how public health officials and theorists can better study, understand, analyze, and account for religion's influence in the U.S. public health policies and practices.