Prof. Dr. Michael Knipper
Michael Knipper is Professor of Global Health, Migration, and Medical Humanities at the Institute for the History, Theory, and Ethics of Medicine at the University of Giessen. He is Principal Investigator in the MeDiMi project “Migration and the Humanrightization of ‘Health’: Paradigms, Practices, and Conflicts”.
Michael is a physician, medical historian, and anthropologist, trained at the universities of Bonn (Germany) and Oviedo (Spain). He did clinical work in in Germany and the Amazon region of Ecuador. In his research and teaching, he pursues a historically and anthropologically grounded perspective on the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of health, with particular interest in human rights, intercultural health, and the intersections between migration and health. He established an award-winning global health curriculum and a service-learning project on social support for patients with tuberculosis at Giessen University, and is co-directing an interdisciplinary teaching program on migration and human rights at the same university. He is passionate about international academic cooperation and dialogue, with close relations to Latin America.
Michael contributed to the MIPEX health strand 2015 and 2020, serves as consultant for WHO and IOM and is active member of Doctors of the World Germany. He was part of the UCL-Lancet-Commission on Migration and Health (2017–2018) and coordinator of the Latin American Regional Hub of Lancet Migration until 2024.
