Associate Dean Javier Escobar, MD, MSc, oversees the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School’s Office of Global Health, which is responsible for international collaborations, medical student global activities and independent projects, and a global health fair. Escobar also teaches a global health primer course in the school’s master of biomedical sciences program.

The medical school collaborates with more than 30 institutions in Argentina, Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Greece, India, Ireland, Japan, Nigeria, Romania, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Each year, 30-50 medical students travel abroad for formal, supervised rotations. The school also hosts 25-30 international medical students or residents in New Brunswick each year. The office also runs the Chancellor’s Global Health Scholars program.

Escobar conducts National Institutes of Health-funded research on genetics of severe mental disorders. He is the principal investigator at Rutgers for the NIH grant “Colombia-U.S. Cross-Disorder Collaboration in Psychiatric Genetics,” which is funded for five years (2017–2022). This project examines genetic influences and endophenotypes in a special population in Colombia, South America. He also is co-investigator and mentor of a Fogarty-National Institute of Mental Health training grant in Argentina and has been involved in USAID global projects and other NIH-funded investigations for more than two decades.