Ruth Margaret Gibson
Postdoctoral Scholar, Health Policy
Bio
Dr. Ruth M. Gibson (如詩 吉布森) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford University with a courtesy appointment at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Her work is supported by the Department of Health Policy and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, the most prestigious postdoctoral award given by the Government of Canada to future global leaders in health research, medicine, and the humanities.
Dr. Gibson specializes in global health, foreign affairs, and strategic studies, with a dedicated focus on improving maternal and child health in geopolitically complex regions affected by war, geopolitical coercion, and diplomatic challenges. She holds an Honour's Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto, a fellowship in Medical Education from the Wilson Center for Medical Education at the University Health Network, and a PhD in Global Health and Strategic Studies from the University of British Columbia. Fluent in English and French, and proficient in Mandarin Chinese, Dr. Gibson has spent a decade living abroad, engaging in humanitarian and global health initiatives across eight countries on five continents. Her experience spans fragile regions grappling with poverty, human rights issues, and war.
Currently, she is leading a project that utilizes wargames and complex systems modeling to analyze the civilian consequences of escalating tensions between China and Taiwan. Recently, she published significant findings on the impact of foreign aid sanctions on maternal and child health in The Lancet Global Health, garnering attention in Nature Medicine, The Stanford Report, and numerous international media outlets due to its critical relevance in today’s geopolitical landscape.
Dr. Gibson collaborates with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop a universal monitoring system to assess the impact of sanctions on human rights. Her research has been cited in UN General Assembly meetings by the Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures. She also contributes to mental health reports for the International Criminal Court's prosecution of war crimes and collaborates with the Global Burden of Disease Consortium at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, to publish health estimations and forecasts in The Lancet.
Leading a diverse team of academic scholars and independent experts and consultants, Dr. Gibson fosters a collaborative environment that encourages participation across various fields, including politics, statistics, simulation modeling, and social media design. Together, they aim to tackle complex questions regarding how civilian and child well-being is impacted by geopolitical challenges and foreign policy decisions. Dr. Gibson welcomes inquiries from those interested in conducting interdisciplinary research with real-world impact. She is responsive to journalists and media outlets seeking to understand issues which fall at the intersection of geopolitics, foreign policy, and health.
Dr. Gibson can be reached at rmgibson (at) stanford.edu
Honors & Awards
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Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanier-Banting Secretariat, Government of Canada (2022 - 2025)
Contact
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8697-312XCurrent Research and Scholarly Interests
Background: The majority of preventable child deaths in the world are now occurring in populations plagued by violent conflict and protracted political instability. Despite this emerging global epidemiology, there remains a paucity of analytic guidance for developing policies and programs that provide essential services to the most vulnerable subgroups in these populations – particularly children. The current humanitarian catastrophes in Ukraine and the Middle East have underscored the urgent need for transdisciplinary research to understand how military strategies, foreign policies, and global child health institutions can better protect children in complex security and political environments and respond to their needs when protections fail. This project is innovative in integrating the military strategy analysis of war games and tabletop exercises (TTX) with the humanitarian epidemiology of child health. This study will expand methods for utilizing the processes and findings of war games and TTX to assess the potential impact of geopolitical tensions on vulnerable child populations in the affected regions. The focus of this effort is the escalating tensions between China and Taiwan and the potential humanitarian needs of children in the Indo-Pacific region under different adversarial scenarios. While this project focuses on China-Taiwan escalation scenarios, it is constructed to explore more broadly the potential of using strategic war games and TTX as a novel methodology to plan for and ultimately mitigate the impact of geopolitical tension and violent conflict on children and other vulnerable civilian populations. A central critique of traditional humanitarian responses has been that they are largely reactive in nature and have not been adequately informed by predictive guidance and planning. This project will utilize extant strategic planning exercises concerning potential escalations in the China-Taiwan theater to help shape mitigative humanitarian planning. These escalatory scenarios are likely to include trade restrictions, embargoes, and the frank use of force. This study focuses on trade restrictions and embargoes. These scenarios will provide a wealth of insights regarding the potential impacts on food supplies, health systems, and economic well-being in the entire region, including low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), with a focus on the consequences for child health.
Action Plan: This project is intended to be of direct relevance to planning and policy initiatives designed to protect civilians. Accordingly, the project components have been developed to link state-of-the-art analysis with direct engagement with Taiwanese scholars, government planners and policymakers, US, and regional experts in intelligence and planning analysis, health planning and preparedness, US Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, planning cells at combatant commands (i.e. USINDOPACOM), Office of Naval Intelligence and others.
All Publications
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The impact of aid sanctions on maternal and child mortality, 1990-2019: a panel analysis.
The Lancet. Global health
2025
Abstract
Aid sanctions are a type of financial punishment imposed on a country by other countries or international organisations in response to a political coup, armed conflict, or human rights abuses. Humanitarian catastrophes in Burkina Faso, Sudan, and Myanmar have brought aid sanctions to the centre of the foreign affairs strategy debate because of their inadvertent negative effects on human health. Our analysis investigates the effects of aid sanctions from 1990 to 2019 on maternal and child mortality. These questions are particularly relevant in the context of the abrupt shift in US foreign aid policy in 2025, leading to aid prohibitions that might resemble aid sanctions in their effects.Data were drawn from a broad set of sources, including population health metrics databases, established sanctions databases, and a novel global dataset on aid sanctions created for this study. We assessed the prevalence of the use of aid sanctions worldwide during 1990-2019 and estimated their impact on official development assistance (ODA) and development assistance for health (DAH). We investigated the effect of aid sanctions on infant (age <1 year), children younger than 5 years (hereafter referred to as under-5), maternal (within 42 days of the end of pregnancy), and all-age mortality rates using panel difference-in-differences ordinary least squares estimation. We applied linear regression methods and included country and year fixed effects, country-specific time trends, and multiple control variables. We also conducted a series of sensitivity analyses, including entropy balancing, to confirm the validity of our results.During our study period, 67 low-income or middle-income countries (LMICs) and sovereign territories (hereafter referred to as countries) were targeted by 88 unique aid sanction episodes. Relative to our control group of 66 never-sanctioned countries, aid sanctions reduced ODA by an estimated US$213·07 million per year (95% CI 502·28 to -76·12) for the average target country and reduced DAH by $16·42 million (32·57 to 0·27)--a 17% reduction in DAH. Aid sanctions resulted in an additional 129·3 infant deaths per 100 000 livebirths (11·7 to 246·9), an additional 47·1 under-5 deaths per 100 000 livebirths (-2·8 to 97·0), and an additional 10·9 (2·2-19·6) maternal deaths per 100 000 livebirths, per year. Relative to mean in-sample mortality rates, aid sanctions thus increased infant, under-5, and maternal mortality rates by 3·1%, 3·6%, and 6·4%, respectively, on an annual basis.Over the period 1990-2019, infant, under-5, and maternal mortality rates among LMICs declined at average annualised rates of 2·6%, 3·2%, and 2·0%, respectively. Aid sanction episodes lasting 5 years-the median duration observed in our sample-would thus negate nearly 30% of the overall improvements in infant and under-5 mortality seen in the average LMIC over this period and approximately 60% of the improvements in maternal mortality. Our findings suggest that aid sanctions are leading to increases in child and maternal mortality via reductions to ODA and DAH and they can inadvertently compound human suffering. This research provides quantitative evidence to support growing legislative awareness of the importance of assessing health impacts while aid sanctions are imposed, and highlights the need to monitor the consequences of foreign aid policies by donor countries, such as foreign aid prohibitions and restrictions.Center for Innovation in Global Health and the Maternal and Child Health Research Institute, Stanford University.For the Arabic, French, Mandarin and Russian translations of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.
View details for DOI 10.1016/S2214-109X(25)00058-0
View details for PubMedID 40120594