The Department was founded in 1962 and has steadily grown since. It currently has a staff of about 60, which includes full professors, assistant professors (scientists with "habilitation"), research associates, support staff (lab technicians, managers and staff assistants), and a varying number of visiting scholars, post doctoral fellows and doctoral students.

The Department of Tropical Hygiene and Public Health is one of five departments within the Institute of Hygiene (Hygiene und medizinische Mikrobiologie, Parasitologie, Virologie, Tropenhygiene und öffentliches Gesundheitswesen, Molekulare Virologie). The Department is part of the University which enjoys a public core funding. However, more than two thirds of our funds (and therefore our staff) is competitively acquired for research, teaching and consulting activities. Our mission statement emphasizes our international perspective with a focus on low and middle income countries.

Mission statement

Our mission is to contribute to the improvement of health through research, teaching and direct services (patient care, consulting) in developing countries and at home.

To fulfill this mission, we attach great importance to linking our activities in two ways: on the one hand, we want to make sure that our staff teaches, evaluates development projects in the health sector of low and middle income countries and participates in research so that their insight and experience from different activities are enhancing each other. As an example, research results are fed immediately into lectures; insights from policy evaluation help us in the design of our own research projects.

On the other hand, we seek to look at health and health systems from an international perspective, linking experience in the north and south. An example is our study of different ways to organize health insurance, spanning from our own Bismarckian social security to community-based insurance in Burkina Faso.

A third linkage we cherish at the Department, is the linkage between different disciplines. Health economists, epidemiologists, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, mathematicians, geographers, management specialists and biologists work closely together with public health and clinical physicians.

Our staff is working within five thematic units:

1. Health Systems Research
2. Health Economics
3. Epidemiology and Biostatistics
4. Clinical Tropical Medicine
5. Disease Control: Schistosomiasis Research and Malaria Research

Each unit develops their substance area integrating research, teaching and service. In addition, we have a teaching office to coordinate and support the Department' s teaching activities. A management support staff coordinates administrative and financial tasks

Teaching activities of the Department include

Undergraduate:

• Teaching Heidelberg' s medical students Public Health (HEICUMED)

Postgraduate

• Master of Science in International Health (MScIH) (English)
• Short Courses in International Health (English)
• Graduate School Epidemiology (English)
• Entwicklungshelferkurse (development aid worker preparation course) (German)
• Ärzteprogramm (Medical Doctor Programme) (German )