From the Global Health Director's Desk

2015 Fall Issue: September 11, 2015

Greetings Global Health Colleagues,

I hope you all had an enjoyable summer.  As we jump into the new academic year, I wanted to share an update on our latest activities and what lies ahead.

Eduation Updates

It gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of a Masters of Global Health in Epidemiology, a new graduate degree concentration starting this Fall. Students enrolled in the Masters of Epidemiology program will have the opportunity to pursue a Global Health Concentration with focused courses and research opportunities that will prepare them for a career in global health. Please contact Steve Goodman for information about the program.

In June, we welcomed interns Josh Biddle and Yoanna Pumpalova as the fourth cohort of residents in the Internal Medicine Global Health Track. Josh joins us from the UCSF School of Medicine and Yoanna from Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

Throughout the summer, several residents and faculty members have traveled to the University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences (UZCHS) as part of the $10M NIH-MEPI grant to strengthen medical capacity in sub-Saharan Africa. Director of Global Surgery Sherry Wren and I attended the MEPI Symposium in Harare in July, which highlighted progress and accomplishments at five years. Dr. Wren also conducted the first surgical skills training for female medical students in Zimbabwe, which was attended by 21 students at UCZHS. With the grant in its final year, I encourage faculty to consider short-term teaching or research collaboration while it remains active. Please contact Denishia Clark if you are interested in teaching.

I am also pleased to announce that we were funded by the NIH for a new three-year grant that builds upon MEPI called Promote Excellence in Research and Faculty Enhanced Career Training (PERFECT) at UZCHS. The goal of PERFECT is to conduct training in the following target scientific areas (1) HIV/AIDS (2) Cardiovascular Diseases (3) Mental Health and (4) Sexual & Reproductive Health. The program aims to train a critical mass of up to 25 UZCHS faculty members competent in securing individual research funding, implementing well-executed research projects and undertaking a program of both independent and collaborative research.

Stanford medical student Michael Nedelman, our Stanford-ABC Global Health and Media fellow, began his fellowship year this summer at the WHO in New Delhi and will spend the Autumn quarter in the Stanford Journalism Program. Tune in to his podcast series for updates along the way. Now in its fifth year, the fellowship has moved from NBC News to ABC News following the departure of Nancy Snyderman from NBC, who was instrumental in the program’s development. The fellow will now spend six month embedded in the newsroom at ABC News in New York City under the direction of Chief Health and Medical Editor, Richard Besser.

The two-week intensive Global Health course (MED 233) directed by Cybele Renault and Saraswati Kache begins this week. Nearly 30 graduate students and residents have enrolled for this year’s course.

More than 30 residents, fellows and faculty have been selected to participate in the Johnson & Johnson, Mary Duke Biddle and Stanford Medicine Scholar global health programs for 2015-2016, with the first group of scholars just returning from their rotations this summer. The Fall information session for those interested in applying for an overseas rotation in 2016-2017 will be held Wednesday, September 30 at 6pm in Alway M-112. Please contact Rachel Leslie with questions.

Faculty & Infrastructure Updates

In an effort to strengthen and grow our global health community at Stanford, we have initiated a CIGH Senior Fellow status for faculty who play an interdisciplinary role in global health research, education and clinical care. All faculty members who have completed an assessment will be notified of their acceptance within the next two weeks.

I would also like to announce the new establishment of the Program for Disease Ecology, Health and the Environment at Stanford directed by Giulio De Leo and Susanne Sokolow. The program is a collaboration of CIGH and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and was supported with a grant from SEED. Helping to build this program at Stanford is Matthew Bonds, PhD, who will join CIGH from Harvard Medical School this October as a Cox Visiting Fellow at Earth System Science at Stanford University  for a year. A leading scientist on the front lines of ecology, health and development, Dr. Bonds holds a double PhD in economics and ecology and is executive director of PIVOT, a NGO working in Madagascar to combine health care services with scientific research focused on the underlying causes of poverty and disease. Please welcome Matt when you see him.

Research

Two Stanford-affiliatedTwo Stanford-affiliated international scholars have been selected as Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars for the 2015-2016 academic year: Milcah Dhoro, a postdoc at the UZCHS in Harare, will analyze the immunogenetics of disease progression in HIV perinatal infected children in sub-Saharan Africa; Zhahirul Islam, associate scientist for Food and Waterborne diseases at iccdr,b in Bangladesh is looking at the impact of Guillain-Barré syndrome in patients with Campylobacter Jejuni infection. Applications for the 2016-2017 fellowship cycle are now open on the GHES website.

In September, Steve Luby will conduct the second annual two-day Global Health Research Methods Retreat for medical residents and fellows. The retreat aims to provide the tools and approaches to support global health research proposal development. Contact Denishia if you wish to sign-up.

Also, please mark your calendars for the second annual Global Health Research Convening, which will be hosted by CIGH on January 20, 2016. All recipients of CIGH Ebola Innovation Awards and Seed Awards are expected to participate. On a related note, we will be announcing a call for 2016 CIGH Seed Award proposals later this Fall.

Lastly a few words about comings and goings

In the last six months, we’ve had some exciting and bittersweet transitions at CIGH. First, I would like to introduce our new Deputy Director, Katherine Burke, a global health scholar with extensive leadership, management and communications experience. Kathy will lead the Center’s efforts to build interdisciplinary global health activities across the university and oversee administrative operations of CIGH.

Denishia Clark joined us as Global Health Educational Program Coordinator in May. Nancy Federspiel, who has been an integral member of our core working team, has recently moved on to an exciting new role at SPARK. Any questions regarding seed funding or the Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars program may be directed to CIGH communications officer, Rachel Leslie.

I’d also like to introduce the fabulous Anna Liao who recently joined the group as my new administrative assistant after the departure of Diane Madsen. Anna can be contacted for scheduling and information needs at acliao@stanford.edu.

Future Events

We are currently finalizing our line-up for global health seminars this Fall. Stay tuned for details as we have some wonderful speakers coming.

Pax and Best to all,
Michele

Michele Barry, MD, FACP
Senior Associate Dean for Global Health
Director of the Stanford University Center for Innovation in Global Health

2015 Winter Issue: February 5, 2015

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

Hoping all of you had a great start to 2015! Certainly this last year has been dominated by the Ebola epidemic which, although waning, is still very present. Stanford volunteers remain in the field as well as in our thoughts. A CIGH sponsored University-wide Ebola Innovation Night was held to try to overcome bottlenecks in treatment and care. Four seed grants were awarded in the areas of point-of-care diagnosis, therapeutics, novel ways of viral entry and socio-environmental conversations with modeling.

Ebola Updates to Share
The World Bank and WHO are in discussion about a future global health workforce reserve corps as NGO's and governments continue to struggle with manpower issues (it's been an interesting conversation of which I and a colleague from Georgetown are pushing forward). A new WHO resolution has just been proposed for future emergency deployment of teams in epidemic and humanitarian health crises by the Executive Board. Three vaccine trials will begin in February in Guinea, Sierra Leona and Liberia and will involve ring vaccination similar to the approach to smallpox containment.

WELCOME

New Members of CIGH Leadership
We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Ami Bhatt who was recently recruited from Harvard to Stanford. She will serve as Director of Global Oncology for CIGH and has already convened an active working group directed towards global cancer research. Dr. Bhatt is well known, not only for her science identifying pathogens in the microbiome which may cause cancer, but also for her global oncology website http://globalonc.org which helps low resource countries diagnose and treat cancer.

Our second recruit, who is soon to join CIGH as the Director of Maternal and Child Health, is Dr. Gary Darmstadt. Dr. Darmstadt comes to us from the Gates Foundation where he was a senior fellow for Global Development, leading the Foundation's work on cross-program learning and integration opportunities that show promising impact and strategic importance involving women and girls.

We also welcome Rachel Leslie, our new Communications Officer for CIGH. Any updates on your global activities should be forwarded to Rachel at rachel.leslie@stanford.edu.

Education Updates
Field Service: We are now in the final year of the $10M NIH-MEPI grant in collaboration with the University of Zimbabwe Health Sciences. This year we plan on sending residents and faculty to support the areas of pediatrics, ENT, emergency medicine, oncology, as well as internal medicine. I encourage any faculty to consider short-term teaching or research collaborations while this grant is active.

The Mary Duke Biddle Program is actively recruiting pediatric residents for overseas field service in Uganda, Ecuador, Bangladesh and Nepal, and the Johnson and Johnson Global Scholars Program has selected 25 internal medicine residents for the upcoming year for rotations in Borneo, Rwanda, Colombia, Uganda and South Africa. The Stanford Hospital program has established sites in Ecuador as well as other independent rotations around the world. Hospital-based faculty and residents are welcome to apply on a rolling admissions basis.

Global Health Courses
In September, Drs. Saraswati Kache and Cybele Renault taught the third year of MED 233: Global Health: Beyond Diseases and International Organizations. Twenty-three medical students, residents, fellows and attending physicians participated. A Global Women's Health Course was held by Lynn Westphal. A cross-disciplinary Discussions in Global Health class, which I had the privilege of directing, attracting undergraduate, law and medical students was also held in the fall term, as well as a Global Health Research Methodology Retreat following MED 233, lead by Steve Luby. A more extensive research methodology course for global health projects will be run by Steve at graduate level during the winter term. Bonnie Maldonaldo and colleagues will be running a course on Global Child Health. On February 7-8, 2015 the Third Annual International Humanitarian Aid Surgery Course, led by Dr. Sherry Wren, is enrolled at full capacity. Stanford faculty from OB, Plastics, Orthopedics, General Surgery, EM, and Neurosurgery will be featured teachers.

Educational Infrastructure
A new Program Leadership Council composed of residency directors has been convened to share best practices for residency programs involved in global activities.

Other educational activities such as Journal Club, Conversations in Global Health, Case-Based Tropical Disease course and the Bay Area Global Health Hub series are advertised on our new website, as well as the quarterly newsletter. Keep an eye out for future dates!

Research Updates and Kudos
The first annual Global Health Research Convening was held on January 9, 2015 in a packed Encina Hall with poster and oral presentations from diverse groups working on global health from around the University. Dr Daniel Bausch, a leading researcher in hemorrhagic viruses from Tulane University and a senior advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) on Ebola, was the keynote speaker.

Potential new research collaborations have been explored with the University of Ghana in Accra, as well as KNUST in Kumasi, in association with the SEED-GSB initiative. Please contact me if any faculty or students need overseas collaborators on research projects. Both universities are keen to find Stanford collaborators and lists of project have been proposed. Steve Luby is also in negotiation with NAMRU-3 in Cairo for future research collaborative projects involving infectious disease threats.

Lily Horng represents Stanford as the Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholar. She is working in Bangladesh on two main projects with ICDDRb on HIV and child health. One of her projects explores HIV risks related to methamphetamine use in MSM and transgender persons, dually stigmatized populations. Her child health project involves working with mothers in urban slums and understanding social networks and sharing of child health services. Maren Shapiro is our NBC-Stanford Global Health Social Media Fellow this year and has just been ensconced in the NBC NY Office after a stint in India with WHO and our journalism school.

The Maldonaldo Group received a $3.6M grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a 2.5-year study investigating the dynamics of oral polio vaccine in three household communities in Mexico.

Dr. Mark Davis has received a $50M 10-year Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to support Stanford's Immunology Center to better understand human immune responses to vaccine efficacy around the globe. Stay tuned for a potential call for proposals in the future around research intitaives.

Lastly, on January 20-21, 2015, CIGH co-hosted with Stanford's Big Data Initiative leaders of the INDEPTH Network, a long-standing group collecting and studying population and health data in Africa, Asia and South Asia to determine future research collaborative projects. Both Stanford and INDEPTH researchers presented global initiatives during the two days to determine common research interests.

Thus, another active quarter for Stanford Global Health and CIGH. It is always a pleasure and privilege to work with all of you. Hope to see you at The Consortium of Universities for Global Health Meeting in Boston from March 26-28, 2015. Talk to Diane Madsen about possible registration fee waivers.

Pax,
Michele

2014 Summer Issue: August 1, 2014

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

This is a quarterly update to let folks know where global health activities are going in the next few months and what has been accomplished since the last Dean’s letter.

We had a cross-campus retreat at the Quadrus Center in June to reflect on the past five years since a Dean’s position was created for Stanford Global Health and the three years since the Center for Innovation in Global Health was inaugurated. Olivia Crawford and David O’Brien from Strategic Operations moderated the brainstorming session to help determine a strategic plan for the next five years. Dean Minor and Vice Dean Boxer subsequently have been supportive of the goals proposed and have generously offered support to achieve the major suggestions that evolved from retreat.

In short summary, two new global health faculty will be recruited over the upcoming two years as shared faculty between Stanford School of Medicine and another school or program at the University (e.g. engineering, policy, etc.). Annual multidisciplinary CIGH seed grants will continue focused on global health solutions in drugs, diagnostics and therapeutics. A national search for a new Deputy Director will be initiated, and our new recruit, Andrea Sprockett, MIPH, will be coordinating the educational programs at CIGH. Lastly a geographic site will be selected and supported to have longstanding Stanford faculty and student presence in an ongoing partnership in research, education and clinical service.

Education Update

Fifteen Johnson and Johnson Physician Scholars were chosen for 2014-15, as were the 16 Mary Duke Biddle Scholars. The intensive Global Health Course will be starting in September and will be run by Dr. Cybele Renault and Dr. Saraswati Kache. Thirty-four residents have signed up for this opportunity from 10 residency/fellowship programs. Many outside speakers are scheduled and a hands-on lab experience will be offered. Dr. Steve Luby will be running a 2-day post-course retreat on Global Health Research Methodology for which 12 residents have enrolled.

Research

The inaugural Global Health Research seminar series was held and Dr. Scott Rozelleof FSI presented his work in China.

Our Global Health Equity Scholars consortium, funded by NIH/Fogarty, has selected eight scholars at the graduate and postgraduate level after a national search; in addition, awards for research funding were made to five junior faculty. Stanford-affiliated awardees include: 1) Lily Horng, an Infectious Diseases fellow, who will conduct HIV research in Bangladesh on healthcare use and on knowledge and perceptions about preventing mother to child transmission (PMTCT) in migrant families; and 2) Dr. Jason Andrews, a new Infectious Diseases Assistant Professor, who will investigate the transmission dynamics of tuberculosis in Brazilian prisons. In addition, a Zimbabwean scholar, Tinashe Gede, will work investigating the epidemiology and outcome of sepsis and septic shock in hospitalized, adult HIV-infected patients in Zimbabwe with Dr. David Katzenstein as his Stanford mentor.  A selection of the awarded research projects for other GHES scholars includes: Intervention of HIV, drug use, and the criminal justice system in Malaysia; a pilot study of the implementation of a trauma registry at a trauma referral center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; bacterial vaginosis as an HIV risk factor amongst women in Mysore, India; and Macrophage migration inhibitory factor polymorphisms and disease susceptibility in tuberculosis patients in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The annual orientation for new Fogarty scholars was held at NIH July 6-12, which Nancy Federspiel attended.

Pilot Project Awards

In the recent competition for CIGH and C-IDEA awards, we received over 50 proposals requesting 1.2 million dollars. We were able to make 9 awards.

CIGH Pilot projects awarded for 2014-5
Dr. Shirat Einav and Dr. Vijay Pande will be looking at the repurposing of a drug for dengue control. Ian Connolly and colleagues will be using the funding to scale up their invention in a Brazil trial—Miracle Feet—a 20 dollar club foot corrective brace. Laurie Kwong and Steve Luby will be assessing exposure to pesticides and lead in rural Bangladesh.

C-IDEA awards for 2104-5
The last of our C-IDEA grant monies were distributed as follows: Dr. Gary Schoolnikand colleagues will develop a new TB susceptibility diagnostic platform. Keegan Cooke and Dr. Jeff Koseff will pilot a low cost sensor to track remote shared water points in Kenya. Dr. Jessica Grembi and colleagues will be validating a WaferGen Smartchip PCR assay for pathogens in diarrheal disease. Richard Freeman and Erik Jenson from the law school will be identifying legal bottlenecks that obstruct healthcare in Rwanda. Jessica Vernon and colleagues will be building a better pharmaceutical supply chain in Kenya through Miti Health, and Jason Andrews will be developing a low cost point of care hearing test for patients receiving ototoxic drugs for MDR TB in resource limited settings starting in Ethiopia.

Lastly, I would like to thank all the global health community who participated in the global health retreat and offer a shout out to the leadership group Dr. Paul Yock, Dr. Steve Luby, Dr. David Relman, Dr. Bonnie Maldonaldo, and Dr. Paul Wise, as well as to David O’Brien and Olivia Crawford.

Look forward to the CIGH quarterly meeting in September. We also will be announcing a Global Health Research Day in the winter where people throughout the University working on global health projects will present their work. A keynote address will anchor the event.

Best to all,
Michele

2014 Winter Issue: January 1, 2014

Greetings to my Global Health Colleagues,

I hope you all had a wonderful fall quarter, holiday season and New Year. As we begin the new calendar year, and almost my fifth year, I’d like to provide you with some updates from the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) via this newsletter.

Education Updates

Beginning Wednesday, January 08, 2014, I will be co-moderating the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series: Health and Human Rights (LAW 723) with human rights scholar and Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute Fellow Helen Stacy. It will run on Wednesdays from 5:30-7:00pm, and is open to the public. You can read more about the course here.

Now in the fourth year of collaboration with the University of Colorado, the $10 million NIH-MEPI grant is an attempt to strengthen medical capacity in Zimbabwe’s primary medical school.

At the end of the 2013, we had our annual meeting in Zimbabwe, and I would like to share some of the successes. Since the grant began there has been a 152 percent increase in enrollment in medical school, from 92 students to 237, largely felt to be due to the excitement this grant has generated. Prior to 2009, zero percentage of medical graduates went into internal medicine residency training, since the start of the grant, an average of 16 applicants a year seek internal medicine higher training. Zimbabwean students and faculty have had opportunities to come to both Stanford and the University of Colorado to learn specific skills and exchange knowledge. Over 75 faculty members from partner universities have rotated to Zimbabwe to teach and fill gaps in the curriculum.

Stanford's faculty Bonnie Maldonaldo and David Katzenstein, with longstanding research ties to UZHS, continue to strengthen research skills. Dr. Sherry Wren has started a surgical initiative with a soon to be realized bilateral exchange; Dr. Anna Messner has spearheaded ENT efforts; Dr. Ana Crawford has created Anesthesia curriculum; Dr. Maha Mahadevan has spearheaded the training of ER skills; and Dr. Andrew Connolly has provided both education and clinical Pathology services. Several other Stanford faculty have been involved in the visiting Professor Program as have medical residents, and CIGH’s Dr. Nancy Federspiel has been involved in teaching grant writing skills.

When MEPI began there was no internet connectivity at the medical school: Stanford has sent IT consultants to set up an intranet on campus, enhance connectivity and develop an evidence based approach to medical patients anchored by internet access to textbooks. A private donation by Up-To Date was set up on the intranet and Khan Academy has begun to set up a medical curriculum pertinent to low resource settings. The Stanford School of Medicine global health librarian, Lauren Maggio, has helped develop the UZCHS library capacity, which has seen a 78 percent increase in downloaded activities addressing the study of medicine.

This winter we have faculty, fellows and residents from OHNS, Anesthesia, and Internal Medicine who will be on clinical and education initiatives.

The recipients of the 2014-2015 academic year Johnson & Johnson Scholars program have been chosen and will be announced later this month. Scholars have the opportunity to travel to Zimbabwe, Uganda, Liberia, Borneo, South Africa, Colombia, or Rwanda.

The Mary Duke Biddle Clinical Scholars program, open to medical students who will be in their 3rd or 4th years and to Pediatric residents, is now accepting applications for the 2014-2015 academic year. Students have the opportunity to perform a clinical rotation in Bangladesh, Nepal, Ecuador, or Uganda. Applications and more information are available on our website, and the deadline is February 24, 2014.

The Stanford-NBC Global Health Media Fellowship application process for the 2014-2015 year is now open. In what will be its fourth year, the fellowship offers physicians and physicians-in-training the opportunity to work with the Communications Department of the WHO, with Stanford Journalism faculty and students, and with the NBC Medical News team in New York City. Applications are due February 5, 2014.

The popular two-week comprehensive global health course, Global Health: Beyond Diseases and International Organizations, led by Dr. Saraswati Kache and Dr. Cybele Renault is slated for again for this fall. Residents and fellows from all departments with an interest in global health are invited to apply. Applications will be available through program directors mid-January.

Hot Topics in Global Health is well underway. Global Health resident Meghana Gadgil presented at noon conference on November 6th, Anna Arroyo will present on March 26th, followed by Alex Sandhu on June 4th.

The first Stanford-UCSF Global Health Hub Series will begin January 27th, and will be held at UCSF (subsequently rotating between schools). The topic, “What is the Next Chapter for HIV?” will feature our own Dr. Eran Bendavid, along with Dr. Paul Volberding from UCSF and Stefano Bertozzi, who after a long tenure at the Gates Foundation is the new Dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. For more information and to register, see the UCSF website. We encourage members of the Stanford community to attend this first Hub in the series as we begin to foster cross-talk between the schools. The following Hub will be hosted at Stanford, on the afternoon of March 31st.

Lastly, Stanford has received a philanthropic award to help develop online education programs in low-resource settings. Dean Charles Prober and I are working on the development of this with Khan Academy, amongst other partners.

Research and Faculty Updates

C-IDEA and global biodesign projects continue to be in their last year of funding. Several innovation projects are trying to move to the next stage.

Our CIGH Innovation Awards are in the midst of being evaluated and we hope to announce the winners soon.

Please be aware that the Coulter Foundation Biodesign Award application is due January 17th.

We would like to highlight a few achievements of faculty in the global health space over the last few months:

S.V. Mahadevan, Professor of Surgery – Emergency Medicine, received the 4th Lifeline-AAEMI Award for EMS this past November. It was presented by Dr. Pankaj Arora at the Society for Emergency Medicine of India 2013 Conference in Wayanad, India, where he was also a keynote speaker.

Professor Robert Shafer, of Infectious Disease and Geographic Medicine, has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to advance the use of point-of-care (POC) testing to identify HIV drug resistance in patients.  Professor Shafer's project entails the creation of a list of virus mutations for the sensitive and specific diagnosis of HIV drug resistance, a model to quantify the potential health and economic benefits of POC testing, and an advisory board to draft recommendations for biotechnology companies.

Mark Davis, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, received a Gates Foundation award this past fall. The "Systems Immunology Consortium for TB Vaccines: Highly Multidimensional Assessments," is a three year grants that creates a Consortium with Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, to discover and validate molecular, immunological, and clinical signatures of vaccine efficacy for tuberculosis (TB), malaria and other BMGF-priority diseases/conditions.

Global Health Interest Group Meeting Update

Thanks to all the global health community at Stanford for supporting all activities. Please join us for the next Global Health Interest Group (GHIG) meeting on February 20th, 2014, from 5:30-7:00 PM in Li Ka Shing Room 320 (Dean’s Boardroom).Dr. Niaz Banaei and doctoral students Allison Rhines and Hannah Frank will be presenting on tuberculosis research and diagnostic developments. There will also be an opportunity for networking by interest area for faculty and students.

Conference Updates

Save the dates May 12-14, 2014, for the next Consortium of Universities Global Health Meeting in Washington, DC. I have the honor of being the Scientific co-Chair at this event where Dr. Jim Kim of the World Bank, Peter Piot, Dean of London School of Tropical Diseases, and Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia will be keynoting. We have received almost 1,000 abstracts! Hope to see many of you there.

I wish you all a wonderful 2014.

Thanks to Larkin Callaghan, Steve Luby, Nancy Federspiel, Bonnie Maldonado, and Diane Madsen for their core support of CIGH.

Most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2013 Fall Issue: September 1, 2013

Greetings to my Global Health Colleagues,

I hope you all had a wonderful summer. As we begin the new academic year, I’d like to provide you with some updates from the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) via this newsletter.

CIGH Infrastructure Updates

We have had some exciting and bittersweet transitions at CIGH. Larkin Callaghan started as our new educational programs manager over the summer. Larkin has a doctorate in health behavior and education, and previously worked at Columbia University Medical Center, where she also completed a fellowship in health communication and epidemiology, with various public health non-profits and at the United Nations. Dr. Bonnie Maldonado has begun her role as Director of Academic Global Child Health. She will work closely with Dr. Saraswati Kache to develop global health research in the pediatric global health track. Amy Lockwood, our former Deputy Director, has left CIGH to pursue other opportunities after successfully spearheading our C-IDEA initiative. With the retirement of Laura Walch, the lovely Diane Madsen has joined the group as my new administrative assistant. She can be contacted for scheduling and information needs at dmadsen@stanford.edu.

Education Updates

Hayley Goldbach began her Global Health Media Fellowship this past June. After traveling to Haiti, she worked with the Communications team of the South East Regional Office of the WHO in New Delhi, India. As she arrives at Stanford in the next couple of weeks to begin her training in our graduate journalism program, I encourage you to read her two pieces recently published in The Hindu, one addressing unhealthy eating on college campuses in Delhi, and the other uncovering issues of stigma among those suffering from leprosy in India.

Beginning September 24, 2013, I will lead the course Discussions in Global Health (Med 232), with graduate student Allison Rhines. It will run on Tuesdays from 5:15-7:05pm, and you can read more about the course here.

The Fall information session for those interested in the Johnson & JohnsonScholars program will be held Monday, September 30th at 6:00pm in M-112. Scholars have the opportunity to travel to Zimbabwe, Uganda, Liberia, Borneo, South Africa or Rwanda.

As part of the Stanford – University of Colorado NIH-MEPI grant, residents have the opportunity to spend time doing clinical work in Zimbabwe. This fall, we have surgery and neurology residents traveling to Zimbabwe for rotations, as well as pathology, infectious disease, and ENT faculty who will be doing both clinical and medical education work. Dr. Ana Crawford is on her way to establishing a Stanford rotation for global health anesthesia residents. Dr. Sherry Wren has begun to establish an ongoing surgical rotation for residents, and Dr. Anna Messner of ENT is planning a bilateral exchange.

Dr. Saraswati Kache and Dr. Cybele Renault began the second annual two-week intensive global health course – Global Health: Beyond Diseases and International Organizations – on September 9th. Residents and fellows from pediatrics, psychiatry and child psychiatry, internal medicine, pathology, child neurology, nephrology and pediatric nephrology, infectious disease, and emergency medicine are enrolled.
Hot Topics in Global Health will be making a comeback this year, with four of our global health residents presenting research during noon conferences. Meghana Gadgil will present on November 6th, Rajaie Batniji on January 8th, Anna Arroyo on March 26th, and Alex Sandhu on June 4th.

The first Stanford-UCSF Global Health Hub Series will begin January 27th, and will be held at UCSF (subsequently rotating between schools). The topic, “What is the Next Chapter for HIV?” will feature our own Dr. Eran Bendavid, along with Dr. Paul Volberding from UCSF and Stefano Bertozzi, who after a long tenure at the Gates Foundation is the new Dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

Research and Faculty Updates

Dr. Steve Luby was recently profiled in the Summer 2013 issue of Stanford Medicine magazine, highlighting a water, sanitation and hygiene project of which he is the principal investigator. Based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the goal is a simple, low-cost method for purifying Dhaka’s contaminated water supplies. Currently working with Stanford engineering postdoctoral researcher Amy Pickering, PhD, you can read the full story here.

Two Stanford Global Health Equity scholars spent much of their summer conducting research in Bangladesh. Bats are reservoirs for a diversity of viruses including several that are newly characterized. John Openshaw, MD, is a 2nd year adult infectious disease fellow. Working with collaborators at icddr,b (the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, Bangladesh), Dr. Openshaw designed and implemented a protocol that identifies people who have high exposure to bats and collects their serum. His next steps will be to collaborate with colleagues at Columbia University to develop serological tests against novel new viruses identified in bats and evaluate whether people are infected.

An abnormal gastrointestinal microbiome is thought to contribute to the irregular growth of children in Bangladesh. Yanna Evangaline Hoy, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar working with Dr. Julie Parsonnet, is researching an initial trial of probiotic compounds among infants in Bangladesh to assess their safety and impact on microbiological flora. She has been working with colleagues in Bangladesh to finalize the study protocol and initiate the study.

Dr. Jason Andrews, a Harvard tuberculosis researcher with an active site in Nepal, will be joining the Department of Infectious Disease and Geographic Medicine in January of 2014. Dr. Marcella Alsan will be joining the Stanford at the Center for Health Policy. An infectious diseases economist, she has extensively studied the history of the tsetse fly.

Funding Opportunity Updates

The Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars Program will be accepting applications for the next cohort until December 2, 2013. This consortium with UC Berkeley, Yale, and Florida International University, funds 11 months of research for doctoral students (PhD, DrPH, etc.), professional students (MD, DDS, DVM, PharmD, etc.), and postdoctoral fellows interested in studying diseases and conditions in developing countries. More information about applying can befound here. Junior faculty are also eligible for funding. All fellows spend eight months overseas and are oriented at the NIH.
                                                                                                                                         
For more funding and/or opportunities, check the CIGH website, where opportunities are distinguished by level of training for residents and fellows, as well as medical students.

Interest Group Meeting Update

Thanks to all the global health community at Stanford for supporting all activities. Please join us for the next Global Health Interest Group (GHIG) meeting on October 9th, from 5:30-7:00 PM in Li Ka Shing Room 320(Dean’s Boardroom).Dr. Bonnie Maldonado will be speaking about global polio eradication, Dr. Jack Colford of UC Berkeley will be discussing some of his new WaSH research, and Dr. Eran Bendavid will present some of research work on food security in Kenya. There will also be an opportunity for networking by interest area for faculty and students.

National Update on Global Health

Having just returned from an NIH-Fogarty advisory board meeting, I can tell you that despite sequestration, 95% of grants will be funded in global health (albeit to lesser amounts). At the last MEPI meeting in Uganda, Dr. Eric Goosby announced a commitment to refunding the project for another five years. Facebook has gone into organizing a group of Silicon Valley tech companies to work on providing internet to the developing world. Feel free to read about it in an op-ed I wrote recently published in Reuters.

Save the dates May 12-14, 2014, for the next Consortium of Universities Global Health Meeting in Washington, DC. I have the honor of co-chairing this event where Dr. Jim Kim of the World Bank, Peter Piot, Dean of London School of Tropical Diseases, and Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia will be keynoting.

I wish you all a wonderful start to the new academic year.

Most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2013 Spring Issue: April 1, 2013

Greetings to all,

As the academic year comes to a close, I wanted to provide you with some updates from the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) via this newsletter.

Education Updates

The 2013-2014 Stanford-NBC News Media and Global Health Fellow has been selected.Hayley Goldbach is a third year medical student at University of Pennsylvania and will be starting her fellowship the first week of June. She will be traveling to Haiti and then will go to the South East Regional Office of the WHO in New Delhi, India to work with the Communications group. The 2012-2013 Fellow, Kristina Krohn is finishing her fellowship working at NBC News with Chief Medical Editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman.

Scholars have been selected for the Johnson & Johnson and Mary Duke Biddleprograms for 2013-2014. 18 Stanford scholars will be traveling to Zimbabwe, Uganda, Liberia, Borneo, South Africa or Rwanda as part of the J&J program. And 28 scholars will be traveling to Nepal, Bangladesh, Ecuador and Vietnam for the Mary Duke Biddle program focused on pediatrics. The Orientation Session for all scholars will be held on June 1. More details to come.

As part of the NIH-MEPI grant, residents have the opportunity to spend time doing clinical work in Zimbabwe. Neurology resident, Nirali Vora, is there currently and Arghavan Salles, a surgery resident, will arrive at the end of April. Dr. Sherry Wren is returning for a third visit in June to solidify a working relationship with the Department of Surgery. Dr. Ana Crawford returned from Zimbabwe to establish a Stanford rotation for global health anesthesia residents.

Dr. Saraswati Kache and Dr. Cybele Renault will be leading the second annual two-week intensive global health course - Global Health: Beyond Diseases and International Organizations. This course will enroll 30 students and will be taught September 9 to 20, 2013. It is open to medical students, residents, and fellows from across specialties.

Currently Dr. John Kugler and Dr. Brooke Cotter have been running a successfully packed Case-Based Tropical Disease Course. Their interactive approach to teaching has been a pleasure to watch.

Research Updates

The C-IDEA program was extended for an additional year by the NIH and so work will continue on this exciting program. In April, we hosted a Symposium featuring the work of the past three years through the presentation of over 20 posters and highlighting four representative projects. Masters students Peter Mulligan spoke about EZ*PZ, a device to turn solid waste into usable fertilizer and also improving sanitary conditions in rural Cambodia. Professor of Bioengineering, Manu Prakash presented a foldable microscope that his team has been working on to increase access to diagnostics for infectious diseases in the developing world. Lyn Denend, Director of the Program in Healthcare Innovation at the Business School, described the global health innovation process and identified some of the best practices used and challenges facing inventors. PhD Students Susanna Wen and Izumi Hinkson shared their work to create a vaccine for Chagas disease. In addition, world-renowned economist, Jeffrey Sachsoffered the keynote address titled “Information Technology and the Future of Global Health”. These presentations will soon be posted to the Center for Innovation in Global Health website.

This is the second year that we have offered a CIGH seed grant program, based on funding received from President Hennessey’s office, FSI, the Woods Institute, and the School of Medicine. We received 21 excellent proposals that were evaluated by an internal review committee, and the following four proposals were approved for awards of $30,000 each:

• Exploratory study of sustainability of probiotic use in Bangladeshi infants; Julie Parsonnet, Grant Miller, Stephen Luby, Kaniz Khatun Jannat (icddr,b). This is a study to determine whether probiotics can eventually prevent environmental enteropathy.
• Advancing Cholera Outbreak Management with Mobile Technology; Saraswati Kache, Eric Nelson, Josh Nesbit (Medic Mobile)
• HealthTrax: Solving Health Transportation Challenges Using a Geographic Information Systems Tool in Southern Zambia; Eran Bendavid, Hau Lee, Lesley Sept, Sonali Rammohan, Patricia Carbajales, Davis Albohm, Kala Mehta
• Nuestra Voz – Mexico; A population-wide multisectoral approach to promoting healthy lifestyles to prevent chronic disease in neighborhoods in Mexico. Abby King, Lisa Rosas, Sandra Winter, Jylana Sheats, Deborah Salvo

We have solicited our second round of applications for our Fogarty/NIH Global Health Equity Scholars (GHES) fellowship program, and we are in the process of finalizing this year’s awards. From Stanford, we will provide a full stipend, research funds, and travel support to Enrique Rojas, a postdoctoral fellow in the Bioengineering Department, with Drs. Julie Theriot and K.C. Huang as mentors. Rico is planning to work at the icddr,b in Bangladesh on microbial pathogens. We will also provide research funds and travel support to Yana Hoy-Schultz, an infectious disease fellow doing research with Dr. Julie Parsonnet. Yana will also work in Bangladesh on an exploratory study of the sustainability and effectiveness of probiotic use in Bangladeshi infants for preventing malnutrition and stunting. Finally, we will provide an award to Jim Cybulski, a graduate student in Bioengineering in Manu Prakash’s lab. Jim is designing a unique program to visit multiple Fogarty international sites to assess the utility and different diagnostic and educational applications for his “Foldscope” microscope, a folded paper microscope costing ~$0.50. All of the new awardees as well as those from the first year of the GHES program will be attending an NIH workshop in Bethesda in July.

Funding Opportunity Updates

International Research Collaborations: The new Office of International Affairs is offering 6-8 awards of up to $15,000 each to Stanford faculty to support travel to a non-US location to establish a new international research collaboration or to support a Stanford graduate student on behalf of the faculty member. 
International Online Learning: The Office of International Affairs in cooperation with the Vice Provost for Online Learning (VPOL) invite proposals from faculty to develop innovative online and blended courses in collaboration with non-Stanford faculty in an overseas location. Two awards of up to $65,000 each will be given to individual Stanford faculty or faculty teams (departmental or interdisciplinary) may apply. For more information and application guidelines click here.

Infrastructure Updates

We have had some transitions at CIGH. Joce Rodriguez, who had been educational program manager, has left to pursue a new career. We are posting her job description currently. Dr. Bonnie Maldonado has accepted the role of Director of Academic Global Child Health. She will work closely with Dr. Saraswati Kache to develop global health research in the pediatric global health track. We welcome Bonnie into CIGH leadership!

Interest Group Meeting Update

Thanks to all the global health community at Stanford for supporting all activities. Please join us for the next Global Health Interest Group (GHIG) meeting on May 14 from 5:30-7:00 PM in Li Ka Shing Room 320 (Dean’s Boardroom). The theme will be Reproductive Health and the speakers include Paul Blumenthal who will sharing his a presentation titled Creating a longer-acting injectable contraceptive: Microspheres!and Sepideh Modrek who will provide an overview of several on going research studies of female circumcision in Egypt. There will also be an opportunity for networking by interest area for faculty and students.

Lastly, congratulations to Dr. Maren Grainger-Monsen for the successful launch of her film Revolutionary Optimists. She had a packed audience for the screening and post-movie talk. This inspiring documentary, which has been shown in local theatres, depicts global health activism by young children in India.

Most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2012 Fall Issue: September 13, 2012

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

It is a pleasure to update you with a fall quarterly Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) newsletter.

First, I want to welcome and introduce you to Steve Luby, the new Research Director for CIGH who arrived September first.  Steve was recruited from the International Center for Diarrheal Diseases and Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) where he served as research director for eight years in a shared position with CDC. Steve is a renowned researcher in waterborne disease prevention and emerging infectious diseases. A shortened version of Steve’s resume is available in order to offer a glimpse of the breadth of his background. He will be giving a short presentation on Nipah virus at the next Global Health Interest Group (GHIG) meeting on September 18 from 5:30 – 7 PM in LKS 209. For those who saw the movie Contagion, Steve was responsible for working out transmission of the unexplained encephalitis caused by Nipah virus depicted in the film. All are invited to attend. Please join me in welcoming him.

Education Updates 

This summer we held the first two-week intensive global health course for residents. 24 residents and fellows across subspecialties were enrolled in the course. The course was led by Drs. Saraswati Kache, Clinical Associate Professor in Pediatrics and Cybele Renault, Clinical Assistant Professor, Infectious Diseases and was seen as a valuable learning opportunity by the residents. Read the Stanford Daily report on the course. We plan to offer this course again next year.

The Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Review Committee selected 19 Stanford scholars to participate in the program for 2012-2013. Two scholars have already returned from Liberia and Borneo.  The remaining scholars will be traveling throughout the year to Liberia, Borneo, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Uganda. If you are interested in learning more about the sites, please join us for the next J&J informational session on November 27 from 6 – 7:30 PM in Alway M-112. The deadline to apply for the 2013-2014 academic year is Friday, December 7, 2013.

Kristina Krohn, the 2012-2013 Stanford-NBC News Fellow in Media and Global Health is currently working in the Communications Office of the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva. She has been working on increasing hypertension awareness as part of efforts promoting World Health Day 2013. She’ll be moving to Palo Alto at the end of September for the next three months to start journalism classes as part of the Graduate Journalism program at Stanford. You can follow Kristina via hertwitter and blog. The Stanford –NBC News Fellow in Media and Global Health is a unique fellowship supported by NBCUniversal and the Open Society Foundation.

On September 5, the first resident global health “hot” topic sessions for the 2012-2013 academic year was given by Dr. Ellen Jo Baron, Professor Emerita in Pathology andCepheid Director of Medical Affairs. Dr. Baron spoke about “New Technology in the War Against Tuberculosis”. You can watch a video of her talk on the CIGH’s YouTube Channel. Talks are typically posted 2-3 weeks after date of presentation. For upcoming talks in this series, please visit this page.

As part of the Conversations in Global Health Series, Dr. Ruchama Marton, Founder ofPhysicians for Human Rights-Israel and Dr. Allam Jarrar, a leader of thePalestine Medical Relief Society (PMRS) will be speaking on public health, behavioral health and access to care in Palestine. This session will be moderated by Dr. Rajaie Batniji, affiliated scholar of the Freeman Spogli Institute and internal medicine resident at Stanford. The session will take place on October 26 at noon. For more information, click here.

Research Updates
In spring 2012, CIGH, as part of a consortium with UC-Berkeley, Yale, and Florida International University, was awarded a fellowship program by the Fogarty International Center at NIH to fund ~40 fellows over the next five years to conduct global health research at over 10 overseas mentored sites. The Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars program begins this September.  

Two Stanford fellows will be participating in the inaugural year of this program. The first fellow is John Openshaw, an ID fellow who will be working at the International Center for Diarrheal Diseases and Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) on identifying emerging novel zoonotic infectious agents; his Stanford mentor will be Steve Luby. The second fellow is Shuchi Anand, a nephrology fellow and masters student in epidemiology at Stanford who will be working at the Centre for Chronic Disease Control (CCDC) in New Delhi, India. She will be working on Dialysis and chronic kidney disease care in low- and middle-income countries, with Dr. Glenn Chertow as her Stanford mentor.

In addition, three international fellows will be working at Stanford-affiliated sites. Chibanda Dickson will be working with the University of Zimbabwe on studying the feasibility of training lay health workers to address the gap in availability of mental health treatment; his Stanford mentor will be Dr. Cheryl Gore-Felton. Mohammad Islam will be working at icddr,b to examine the dietary exposure to aflatoxin in children <5 years of age living in the urban slum of Dhaka, Bangladesh; his Stanford mentor will be Dr. Ali Boehm. The third international fellow is Videlis Nduba, from the CDC-Kemri in Nairobi, Kenya; he will continue his prospective studies on two cohorts of young children and adolescents on the incidence and prevalence of  tuberulosis. His Stanford mentors will be Dr. Julie Parsonnet.

Information on the application process for the 2013-2014 academic year will be released soon. For more information, please contact Nancy Federspiel. 
I want to congratulate the faculty who have been awarded CIGH seed grants for 2012-2013.  CIGH seed grants funded by President Hennessey, FSI and the Woods Institute are meant to stimulate high impact global health transformative devices, drugs or health services for the developing world. The following projects and faculty have been selected:

• Newborn hearing screening in the developing world - toward implementation of a novel device and innovative model of service delivery; Paul Yock and Anna Messner
• Point-of-care diagnosis of Tuberculosis by digitization and concentration of reporter enzyme fluorescence in microfluidic picoliter droplets; Sindy Tang and Jianghong Rao. A recent article about this project was published in Nature.
• An Automated, Text Message-Based Reminder System to Improve Childhood Vaccination Rates in Delhi and Warangal, India; Sakti Srivasana and Medic Mobile

These are competitive $50,000 direct seed funding grants awarded to develop a new device, diagnostic or method for health care delivery. For more information, please contact Nancy Federspiel.

The theme of the next GHIG meeting is research. Dr. Steve Luby will start the meeting with a presentation on Nipah Virus. Meghana Gadgil, a second year internal medicine and global health track resident will also be presenting on the impact of hand-washing as a means to combat diseases in low-income settings. Lastly, Nancy Federspiel will discuss the Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars Program and the application process and deadline. Please remember to attend on September 18 from 5:30 – 7 PM in the LKS 209. 

C-IDEA Updates

There are several new and exciting team projects through C-IDEA that I’d like to announce. Some include HeartMap and Clubfoot Connect through theEntrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability (EDEA) class. HeartMap is for patients who have had a heart valve replacement. It helps them adhere to medication programs on a daily basis while also allowing the Naraynana hospital in India to follow-up and monitor outcomes. Clubfoot Connect is an SMS and web-based education and support tool for parents of children undergoing treatment for clubfoot in Brazil.

A student team through the SPARK program is working on a diagnostic tool for dengue; another is working on a point-of-care diagnostic test for TB using a bacterial imprinted slide.

Through the Biodesign program, a student team is working on an implantable device for sustained TB therapy. Another team is working with Medic Mobile on an SMS-based system to improve compliance with diabetes medication at two local Bay Area free clinics.

Infrastructure Updates

We continue to work on updating and building our global health database of faculty and staff doing global health work at Stanford. If you have not yet completed our global health survey, please do so by clicking here. Future plans include a faculty affiliate program for the Center for which the surveys are key.
As you probably know, I have “open career-advice sessions” every month for students interested in speaking with me about their career plans and goals in Global Health. The dates for the 2012-2013 academic year are posted here.  To confirm a time, please feel free to contact my Administrative Associate, Laura Walch.

Lastly, I want to thank my Center for Innovation in Global Health core working team and the support of all our global health colleagues and the community. I also want to thank Laura Walch who serves as the backbone of the CIGH and can be contacted at any time with any questions you may have.

Most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2012 Spring Issue: May 7, 2012

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

As we head toward summer solstice, I wanted to provide you with some new and exciting updates from the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH).  

Education Updates

In January, Bill Foege discussed his career and the eradication of smallpox as part of the series in “Conversations in Global Health”. You can watch the interview here.  In March and April, we hosted Dr. Peter Hotez, the President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute jointly with the Institute of Immunity Transplantation (ITI) and Dr. Jack Chow, a former US ambassador. We are working on organizing a few new sessions for the fall. Professor Susan Reverby from Wellseley discussed the recent unfolding story of the Guatemala US public health “syphilis experiments” on human subjects in our Global Health Grand Rounds series in the Department of Medicine.  Click here.

In March, the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Review Committee selected 19 Stanford scholars to participate in the program for 2012-2013. Selected were 14 internal medicine residents, 2 emergency medicine residents, 1 surgery resident, 1 anesthesia resident and 1 ID fellow.  They will be going to Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Borneo. Also, 10 Mary Duke Biddle Clinical Scholars have been selected for 2012-2013.  Eight are pediatric residents and 2 are medical students. They will be going to Bangladesh, Malawi and Nepal. The pre-departure orientation for these scholars will be held from 1:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 14th in the M-112 classroom and courtyard. You are welcome to stop by if you are interested in hearing about the sites as faculty are also invited to apply.

The Global Health “Hot” Topic Sessions for residents have been very successful and we plan to continue these for 2012-2013. All these sessions are available via our YouTube channel.

Kristina Krohn, a medicine and pediatrics resident at the University of Minnesota, has been selected as the 2012-2013 Stanford-NBC News Fellow in Media and Global Health. She will be starting the Fellowship on June 3, 2012 with a Kaiser Family Foundation media and journalism orientation in DC and then she will be off to Geneva to work in the Communications Office of the WHO. She is very excited about this opportunity and you can read more about her here. Joyce Ho, the inaugural Fellow is wrapping up the first year of Fellowship and will be coming back to Stanford from NBC News in New York to start her third year of medical school. She’ll be presenting a summary of the year and lessons learned to the Stanford-NBC News Fellowship committee and mentors on June 21, 2012. You can follow Joyce via her twitter and blog.

Last December, CIGH was approached by DACOR, an association of foreign affairs professionals located in DC to participate in the launch of a new Fellowship for medical students called the Gantenbein Medical Fund. Stanford CIGH was selected as one of the three participating medical schools. Rishi Mediratta, a first year Stanford medical student was selected by CIGH to interview with DACOR along with two other applicants from competing institutions. Rishi was ultimately chosen as the recipient of this full tuition award and we congratulate him.

Research Updates

Dr. Stephen Luby, as the new CIGH Research Deputy Director, will be joining our faculty here at Stanford with appointments in CIGH, FSI and the Woods Institute. Dr. Luby comes to us from the International Center for Diarrheal Diseases and Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR, B) after serving as the research director there for the past eight years in a shared position with CDC.  Prior to this position, he taught at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan. He will be leading our research efforts within CIGH and we are looking forward to his start in September 2012.   Also, on the research front, some other very exciting news is that CIGH was awarded a fellowship program by the Fogarty International Center at NIH to fund 40 fellows over the next five years to conduct global health research at over 10 overseas mentored sites. Applications are due by mid-May and Fellows will begin orientation in September 2012. To learn more, click here. For more information, please contact Nancy Federspiel.  While on the topic of Fogarty, I was honored to be invited by the Secretary of Health, Kathleen Sibelius to serve for four years on the Fogarty International Center Advisory Board at the National Institute of Health.

C-IDEA Updates

SPARK hosted two master’s students in drug discovery from the University of Zimbabwe for the winter quarter. Milcah Dhoro and Benjamin Chimukangara took Russ Altman's Pharmacogenomics course, attended SPARK seminars and did research in Drs. Altman and Katzenstein's labs. Biodesign embarked on research into the challenges of commercialization of medical devices in the developing world, starting with a focus on the Indian market. The GSB Program for Healthcare Innovation continues to conduct research into global health innovation with case studies in process for several organizations that have faced challenges in implementing global health interventions including PATH, SafePoint and LifeForce and this winter has led the Design for Service Innovation course. They will be exploring potential global projects in the spring, including working with a hospital in Bangalore, India.

The Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class has four teams of students working on global health projects with two partners: a hospital in India and an NGO in Brazil. Projects include developing a patient/family training program to reduce post-operative inpatient times and designing an improved brace to treat children with clubfoot. Lastly, the Program on Liberation Technology, a program that seeks tounderstand how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development and pursue a variety of other social goods joined C-IDEA in March 2012. This program is led by Joshua Cohen, Larry Diamond and Terry Winograd and has worked in partnership with organizations in Kibera, Kenya. They join with the initial support for M-Maji, a project that aims to provide residents with cell phone information about the availability, price and quality of water with a goal to improve health conditions associated with dirty water, including diarrhea.

Infrastructure Updates

We continue to work on updating and building our global health database of faculty and staff doing global health work at Stanford. If you have not yet completed our global health survey, please do so.
As you probably know, I have “open career-advice sessions” every month for students interested in speaking with me about their career plans and goals in Global Health. The new dates for 2012-2013 are posted. For any questions, please feel free to contact my Administrative Associate, Laura Walch.

As a reminder, a great way to learn about the faculty involved in global health and to hear about different global health projects is to join the Global Health Interest Group (GHIG) meetings that are held quarterly. The next GHIG meeting is on Tuesday, July 10th in the LKS 101 Conference Room and you are all welcome to attend.

Lastly, I want to thank my Center for Innovation in Global Health core working team and the support of all our global health colleagues and the community. I also want to thank Laura Walch who serves as the backbone for the CIGH and can be contacted at any time with any questions you may have.

Most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2011 Fall Issue: November 28, 2011

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

Hope you are enjoying these spring days. I wanted to provide you with updates on our activities which have now been centralized in the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH). The name reflects what we strive to do every day: integrate innovative global health ideas into research, clinical work and health care systems.

Education and Clinical Updates

In October, we continued Conversations in Global Health, a new seminar series for those interested in global health policy, programs, and delivery. We had two phenomenal speakers, Chid Liberty, CEO of Liberty & Justice and Ruth Levine, Global Development and Population Director at the Hewlett Foundation. Liberty gave an inspiring talk on the unique model adopted by Liberty & Justice, a for-profit, socially minded company developing African factories that create jobs and improve health care for Liberian women. Liberty’s approach to business was featured in the Stanford Report and you can listen to his interview by Paul Costello, Chief of the School of Medicine (SoM) Communications here. Ruth Levine offered her insights into the history and future of the US government’s approach to global health based on her experience at USAID and the Center for Global Development, an international policy institute in Washington D.C. Her interview will be available online shortly.

Five of the 15 Johnson and Johnson Global Health scholars have come back from their rotations in South Africa, Liberia, Rwanda, Borneo and Uganda. Also, the first of the nine Mary Duke Scholars is currently in Bangladesh. On January 11, 2011 from 6 – 7:30 p.m. we will be holding the yearly J&J Global Health Scholars Program Informational session in which we present on all the J&J sites for those interested in applying. The deadline for 2012 applications is Friday, February 3rd. The informational session will be held in Alway M-112.

We are continuing to partner around medical education at the University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences (UZCHS). In the past few months, we’ve had three Stanford visits there. First, Michelle Cook, IT Specialist traveled to Zimbabwe to build an IT infrastructure by working with Inveneo to set-up servers, develop training documents and set-up UpToDate on a new intranet – a first for UZCHS.

In October, Joce Rodriguez, CIGH Program Manager visited Zimbabwe to do a detailed curricular needs assessment. She met with the UZCHS staff and many of the department chairs to better understand how visiting faculty can be of the most help during the short two-week visits. Her report can be found here.

Lauren Maggio, Global Health Librarian, also visited Zimbabwe in October. She co-taught information literacy sessions to faculty, fellows and medical students. While there, she worked with the UZCHS library staff to 1) brainstorm topics such as the role of the library in distributing textbooks, 2) support MEPI projects, and 3) organize and index local and Stanford lecture content to be used at the University. She also met with Co-PI James Hakim to create a presentation on Medical Education Research, Initiatives and Innovations in Sub-Saharan Africa: Status, Gaps and a Call to Actionwhich was presented at the MEPI PI Executive Council on 10/18 in Nairobi, Kenya. The Council is interested in continuing the conversation and enlisting other interested faculty and students.

We are currently concentrating much of our efforts on the Visiting Professors Program. We are looking for fellows and faculty who are interested in going to Zimbabwe for at least two weeks, preferably one month, to help with the medical student (pre-clinical and clinical) curriculum as well as residency lectures and ward teachings. But, we are also looking for faculty who while there can help with workshops in grant writing, research and teaching methodologies. Please contact Joce Rodriguez for more information.

In November, we launched the interactive, web-based ethical challenges course in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. The course includes 10 cases, each with three interactive vignettes, which address important ethical challenges targeted towards individuals from diverse disciplines with little or no prior experience in global health. The course is open to the public and can be accessed here. We presented a poster on this course at the Annual CUGH Conference in Montreal, November 13-15.

To respond to the desire to integrate more global health education across residencies, in October, we launched a seminar series on “Hot” Topics in Global Health for residents across disciplines. These sessions are held every first Wednesday of the month from 12 – 1 p.m. in the Grant Building, S101 conference room. So far, we have had two sessions, one by myself on “Key Players in Global Health” and another by Internal Medicine Resident, Rajaie Batniji, DPhil, MD on “Global Health Financing: Understanding Where the Money Goes”. Both can be viewed here. The next session will be held on December 2nd by Bert Patenaude, Research Fellow at Hoover Institute and Lecturer at Stanford University on “Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief”. A full list of future sessions can be viewed here.

Joyce Ho, the inaugural Stanford-NBC News Fellow is thriving at the Stanford Journalism School where she is currently taking classes after having returned from six weeks in Geneva at the WHO Communications Center. As part of her fellowship, she is blogging for the Open Society Foundation Public Health Program (OSF PHP) once a month. Her last blog post was on the importance of weaving a narrative when communicating about global health. Read her latest blog post for OSF PHP here. Deadline to apply for the Global Health Media Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year is Friday, February 3rd. More information can be found here.

Research and Funding Updates

CIGH is launching a multidisciplinary seed grant program to support research projects to apply innovative approaches to global health problems in resource-poor settings. Grants are supported by a group of donors, including: the Stanford University Office of the President, the Dean of the School of Medicine, the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more information visit here. Letters of intent are due by January 15, 2012 to Laura Walch.

We also submitted a proposal to the NIH Fogarty International Center to establish a Consortium Support Center with University of California-Berkeley, Yale University, Stanford University and Florida International University for postdoctoral fellows, PhD graduate students, and medical students to develop a long-term career in global health research. The training program will emphasize a multidisciplinary, problem-based approach using “slum health” as a platform to expose trainees to the new concepts, models, and approaches to global health research. The training will be conducted at US government-funded field research sites at 10 locations abroad, including Central and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and Eastern Europe, where the Consortium mentors have been conducting research for more than three years.

C-IDEA Updates

Innovations in global health are continuing to be pursued through the university-wide Consortium for Innovation, Design, Evaluation and Action (C-IDEA). Over fourteen projects were initiated in the first year of the grant and several of the teams supported by C-IDEA funding are continuing their research. Teams traveled to India and Bangladesh, among other places, in order to further investigate the technical requirements and markets for their devices. Notably, two teams from the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability have been accepted into the Biodesign Global Exchange program including: Adaptair, a silicon mask to improve the effectiveness of CPAP devices used to treat severe respiratory disease in children and Caregiver, a low-cost infusion device. In addition, a new Global Health Innovators community has been convened by the participants and graduates of C-IDEA supported programs through which the individuals continuing to work on these issues connect with the broader community and share ideas, information and support for global health innovation projects. Please contact Amy Lockwood for more information.

Infrastructure Updates

In an attempt to update and build our global health database of faculty and staff doing global health work at Stanford, on November 10 we sent a survey to all university faculty to complete if involved in a global health project and would like to be listed on our website. My team and I have been working to create a CIGH Senior fellow Affiliates Program, which you will hear more about as we further develop the criteria. If you have not yet completed the survey, please do so by clicking here. It takes no longer than 5-10 minutes to complete; we appreciate your time.

As you may imagine it is has been a pretty busy time for us. I want to thank my Center for Innovation in Global Health core working team -- Amy Lockwood, Joce Rodriguez and Nancy Federspiel -- and the support of the growing community of faculty aligned with the Center. I would like to take this time to introduce my new Administrative Associate, Laura Walch who can be reached by email at lauraw@stanford.edu and thank Andrew Slean who did a terrific job as a temporary administrative assistant.

Stay warm and most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2011 Summer Issue: July 5, 2011

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

It’s been a full semester for global health at Stanford with several ongoing activities to report upon to the global health community.  On a very personal note I had the pleasure of attending a meeting along with the Fogarty Center, CDC and PEPFAR in Washington DC to finalize the plan to initiate a medical arm of the Peace Corps, which when launched will be called the Global Health Partnership.  This is scheduled to be piloted in August 2011, with 20 people for one year each and a goal of growing to 700 corps members over the next five years. Plans including provision of debt amnesty for corps members and finances for this part of the program are still being investigated, but it looks promising.

The Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) co-sponsored several educational events and activities across campus this spring and into early summer.  Thank you to those of you who were able to attend and keep a look out for exciting plans coming in the autumn.

With the Graduate School of Business (GSB), we offered a provocative multidisciplinary seminar series in the spring for business and medical students, fellows and faculty on the Role of Multinationals and their Impact upon Global Health. Speakers were webcasted and questions fielded from the live and on-line audience.  Speakers included:

• David Kessler, past FDA Commissioner giving his perspective on the somewhat intentional impact the food industry has had upon the obesity epidemic
• Robert Proctor, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford sharing his experiences working on issues of tobacco regulation in the US
• Donald Shriber, the CDC’s Deputy Director for policy and Communication discussing the role of government agencies in global health
• Jack Watters, VP for External Medical Affairs from Pfizer to discuss the pharmaceutical industry
• Sir Richard Feachem, past head of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and current Executive Director of UCSF’s Global Health Sciences discussing new approaches to his perspective of the broken aspects of the AID industry.

The GSB Healthcare Innovation Summit was held on May 11 at the GSB led by Stefanos Zenios. The CGH co-sponsored a global health panel which featured: Dr. Sally Stansfield from WHO, Dr. Stephen Rulisa of the National University of Rwanda, Dr. Frank Nyonator of Ghana Health Service, and Anne Moncure of Fortis Healthcare.  Panelists discussed how countries in Africa and Southeast Asia have innovated with constrained resources for effective delivery of health services and offered a different perspective for US delivery of care.   This panel, and others from the event, can be accessed here.

Conversations in Global Health, a new seminar series for those interested in global health policy, programs, and delivery, started on May 18.  The first session featured Andrea and Barry Coleman, the founders of Riders for Health as well as a panel discussion including Krista Donaldson from D-Rev Design, Kel Sheppy fromWild4Life and Ana Zacapa of the Skoll Foundation.  These conversations will provide insights into various aspects of global health delivery and are meant to be extremely interactive.  They will be held quarterly starting in the autumn.

The 15 new Johnson and Johnson Stanford Clinical Scholars and 8 new Mary Duke Biddle Scholars that were announced in March-April attended a pre-departure orientation program on July 2 to prepare them for their for overseas placements.  The scholars will be working in: Bangladesh, Borneo, Liberia, Malawi, Nepal, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda.

Drs. Alexander Sandhu and Lance Downing have arrived as the inaugural Global Health Track Residents in Internal Medicine. During this program, they will be rotating on a monthly basis to a migrant farm camp working with Dr. Sara Doorley, who runs a mobile health van in Morgan Hill.

Drs. John Kugler and Brooke Cotter ran a standing room only tropical medicine case-based series for residents, faculty and fellows going overseas. Their innovative interactive teaching styles engaged all despite the often-impugned evening venue.

As part of the Novel Education Clinical Trainees and Researchers Program (NECTAR) in Zimbabwe, Dr. Trevor Winter visited Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare to jumpstart the new Stanford Visiting Professors Program funded by the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), an NIH program to enable medical education in sub-Saharan Africa. Professors from Stanford are working with those from the University of Colorado and the University of Zimbabwe Health Sciences in an attempt to rebuild medical education. More information on this program and an application for the Visiting Professors Program are available here.

Throughout the academic year, the CGH has been actively funding design projects focused on global health in the SPARK Drug & Diagnostic Discovery, Biodesign, Stanford Health Policy, GSB Program for Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability programs and courses through the C-IDEA grant provided by the NIH.  Fourteen new projects have been spawned by this grant and include innovations in the delivery of oxygen to pediatric patients, evaluation of a low-cost incubator, POC diagnostics for TB and schistosomiasis, treatment of lymphedema, improved vaccine transportation and assays to distinguish types of diabetes and detect ne-natal jaundice. Medical students are encouraged to enroll in these courses and participate in these programs for the 2011-12 school year. 

Last but not least, the CGH has created the Stanford-NBC Fellowship in Media and Global Health in order to teach future clinicians to use different forms of media to advocate for global health and help lessen health inequities. The inaugural fellow, Joyce Ho is a Stanford second year medical student who was selected through a national application process. She will be working in various media settings including with Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Chief Medical Correspondent for NBC News, NING - a new social media platform, the Journal for Health Affairs, and Mark Tuschman, a photojournalist.  She will also complete training programs through the Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism and with the Kaiser Family Foundation.

All in all it has been a busy quarter. As they say it takes a village -- none of these activities could be realized without the help of the Center for Global Health core working team and the support of the growing community of faculty aligned with the Center.

Safe travels for the summer.

Most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2011 Spring Issue: April 27, 2011

Dear Fellow Global Health Colleagues,

Happy Spring! It has been an exciting few months for the Stanford Center for Global Health (CGH). I would like to update you on some of the activities over the last quarter and introduce you to new global health colleagues. First, let me introduce the new Deputy Director for the Center, Amy Lockwood. Amy brings both business and global health experience. After achieving an MBA at Stanford and working for Mercer Management Consulting, she directed the Global Pediatrics HIV/AIDs Program for the Clinton Foundation and served as Executive Director for Project Healthy Children, an NGO focused on addressing micronutrient malnutrition. Amy will be managing the C-IDEA grant and the administrative components of the Center.

In June, Alexander Sandhu from Northwestern University and Lance Downing from Case Western University will join us as the first pilot class of interns in the Global Health Track in Internal Medicine Residency. I also want to welcome two new consulting Professors to the Center, Lynne Gaffikin, an expert in health and conservation , and Kristie Ebi, an expert in climate and health sequelae.

Updates

The Consortium for Innovation, Design, Evaluation and Action (C-IDEA), which is supported by a grant from the NIH, has been making progess over the past several months. Student teams in the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability course are developing products to prevent childhood deaths caused by pneumonia in resource-poor settings and have recently traveled to Bangladesh to conduct on-site needs finding and prototyping. The SPARK program has selected two projects for development: a rapid expired breath test for acute pulmonary tuberculosis and a point-of-care blood test to distinguish type 1 from type 2 diabetes. Two student teams from the Biodesign Innovation class are focused on global health needs: a better way to non-invasively monitor neo-natal jaundice. A new course, Design for Service Innovation, open to graduate students from all schools and departments was introduced for the first time this quarter and on May 11th, a Health Care Innovation Summit co-sponsored by the CGH and the Graduate School of Business (GSB) will include a panel focused on global health services. Several more student projects will be supported through these courses and others for the duration on this grant. 

In February, Nancy Federspiel, the Center’s research strategist, and I attended a two-week workshop at the University of Zimbabwe as part of the Novel Education Clinical Trainees and Researchers (NECTAR) Program that is supported by the Medical Education Initiative Program (MEPI) grants from the NIH. Lauren Maggio, Lane's Medical Education and Global Health Librarian traveled to Harare in March to collaborate with Zimbabwean medical librarians in building their Information Literacy curriculum for medical students and faculty.  She also joined medical teams on rounds to introduce evidence based learning and is working with the School of Education. Lane Library at Stanford and NIH to consider starting new Journal for all the NIH MEPI programs anchored at Stanford.   A number of professors will be visiting the University over the next several months to provide clinical training and classroom instruction. Dr. Trevor Winter is leading the NECTAR Visiting Professors program and is currently in Zimbabwe identifying the educational priorities for students.  Faculty who are interested in participating in the program can contact Dr. Winter. 

Many of our students, residents and faculty have been working in the field through the Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholars program.  Brooke Cotter and John Kugler have just returned from Alam Sehat Lestari Health in Harmony in Borneo.  Jori Bogetz and Megumi Itoh will be at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICCDR, B) until mid-April. And Ewen Wang will be heading to the Borneo site in June.  We have selected 16 J&J scholars from Stanford for 2011-2012. In 2010-2011, two medical students and one pediatric resident participated in the Mary Duke Biddle Clinical Scholars program. Tamara Montacute worked in Oaxaca, Mexico on a project to promote the consumption, production and commercialization of amaranth for nutrition purposes; Joslyn Woodard traveled to Pampanga, Philippines to provide outpatient services, and education to prevent non-communicable diseases with Dr. Julieta Gabiola; and Lena Winestone provided direct patient care to children in Patan Hospital in Nepal. The selection committee for 2011-2012 Mary Duke Biddle Scholars will announce next year’s scholars in the coming weeks.

A new seminar course, The Impact of Multinationals on Global Health is being offered this spring quarter in partnership with the Program in Health Care Innovation at the GSB and will feature speakers from a variety of industries speaking about how they play a role in aspects of global heath.  The series is open to all members of the Stanford community and the lectures will be filmed and available on the seminar series website. Also, a seminar series on Case-Based Tropical Medicine starts this week and is open to medical students, residents and faculty. This series will prepare scholars for clinical experiences in low-resource settings. A web-based training course on Ethical Challenges in Short-Term Global Health Training is currently under development in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Please stay tuned for more information on this project.  We are also launching a one year new Fellowship in Media and Global Health. Deadline to apply is Monday, May 16th.

I was recently invited to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting, held April 1-3 in San Diego California where I participated on a panel with Pape Gaye, the President and CEO of IntraHealth International; Deogratias Niyizonkiza, Founder of Village Health Works; Rajesh Panjabi, Executive Director of Tiyatien Health; and Emily Bearse, Recruitment Director of the Global Health Corps.  We discussed the shortage of health workers in the developing world and programs designed to address this need including a US Global Health Service Corps, to focus on medical education and health systems by helping to build up the local health care workforce.  A petition form is still available for you to sign here to help lobby for this debt amnesty program. I will be traveling to Washington, D.C. to present this June 6th.

In summary, lots of exciting activities and even a new affiliation and dedicated space at Freeman-Spogli Institute for the Center for which we thank Chip Blacker and Ann Arvin for their support.  Lastly, our next Global Health Interest Group meeting is Wednesday, June 8th from 5:30 p.m to 7:00 p.m. in the LKS 101 Conference Room. These quarterly “speed-dating” sessions help us build a global health community here at Stanford.  

Warm regards and as always safe travels,
Michele Barry 
Senior Associate Dean for Global Health
Director for the Center for Global Health
Stanford University

2010 Fall Issue: October 25, 2010

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

It’s been a full semester for global health at Stanford with several ongoing activities to report upon to the global health community.  On a very personal note I had the pleasure of attending a meeting along with the Fogarty Center, CDC and PEPFAR in Washington DC to finalize the plan to initiate a medical arm of the Peace Corps, which when launched will be called the Global Health Partnership.  This is scheduled to be piloted in August 2011, with 20 people for one year each and a goal of growing to 700 corps members over the next five years. Plans including provision of debt amnesty for corps members and finances for this part of the program are still being investigated, but it looks promising.

The Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) co-sponsored several educational events and activities across campus this spring and into early summer.  Thank you to those of you who were able to attend and keep a look out for exciting plans coming in the autumn.

With the Graduate School of Business (GSB), we offered a provocative multidisciplinary seminar series in the spring for business and medical students, fellows and faculty on the Role of Multinationals and their Impact upon Global Health. Speakers were webcasted and questions fielded from the live and on-line audience. These sessions can be accessed here.  Speakers included:

• David Kessler, past FDA Commissioner giving his perspective on the somewhat intentional impact the food industry has had upon the obesity epidemic
• Robert Proctor, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford sharing his experiences working on issues of tobacco regulation in he US
• Donald Shriber, the CDC’s Deputy Director for policy and Communication discussing the role of government agencies in global health
• Jack Watters, VP for External Medical Affairs from Pfizer to discuss the pharmaceutical industry
• Sir Richard Feachem, past head of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and current Executive Director of UCSF’s Global Health Sciences discussing new approaches to his perspective of the broken aspects of the AID industry.

The GSB Healthcare Innovation Summit was held on May 11 at the GSB led by Stefanos Zenios. The CGH co-sponsored a global health panel which featured: Dr. Sally Stansfield from WHO, Dr. Stephen Rulisa of the National University of Rwanda, Dr. Frank Nyonator of Ghana Health Service, and Anne Moncure of Fortis Healthcare.  Panelists discussed how countries in Africa and Southeast Asia have innovated with constrained resources for effective delivery of health services and offered a different perspective for US delivery of care.   This panel, and others from the event, can be accessed here.

Conversations in Global Health, a new seminar series for those interested in global health policy, programs, and delivery, started on May 18.  The first session featured Andrea and Barry Coleman, the founders of Riders for Health as well as a panel discussion including Krista Donaldson from D-Rev Design, Kel Sheppy fromWild4Life and Ana Zacapa of the Skoll Foundation.  These conversations will provide insights into various aspects of global health delivery and are meant to be extremely interactive.  They will be held quarterly starting in the autumn.

The 15 new Johnson and Johnson Stanford Clinical Scholars and 8 new Mary Duke Biddle Scholars that were announced in March-April attended a pre-departure orientation program on July 2 to prepare them for their for overseas placements.  The scholars will be working in: Bangladesh, Borneo, Liberia, Malawi, Nepal, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda.

Drs. Alexander Sandu and Lance Downing have arrived as the inaugural Global Health Track Residents in Internal Medicine. During this program, they will be rotating on a monthly basis to a migrant farm camp working with Dr. Sara Doorley, who runs a mobile health van in Morgan Hill.

Drs. John Kugler and Brooke Cotter ran a standing room only tropical medicine case-based series for residents, faculty and fellows going overseas. Their innovative interactive teaching styles engaged all despite the often-impugned evening venue.

As part of the Novel Education Clinical Trainees and Researchers Program (NECTAR) in Zimbabwe, Dr. Trevor Winter visited Parirenyata Hospital in Harare to jumpstart the new Stanford Visiting Professors Program funded by the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), an NIH program to enable medical education in sub-Saharan Africa. Professors from Stanford are working with those from the University of Colorado and the University of Zimbabwe Health Sciences in an attempt to rebuild medical education. More information on this program and an application for the Visiting Professors Program are available here.

Throughout the academic year, the CGH has been actively funding design projects focused on global health in the SPARK Drug & Diagnostic Discovery, Biodesign, Stanford Health Policy, GSB Program for Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability programs and courses through the C-IDEA grant provided by the NIH.  Fourteen new projects have been spawned by this grant and include innovations in the delivery of oxygen to pediatric patients, evaluation of a low-cost incubator, POC diagnostics for TB and schistosomiasis, treatment of lymphedema, improved vaccine transportation and assays to distinguish types of diabetes and detect ne-natal jaundice. Medical students are encouraged to enroll in these courses and participate in these programs for the 2011-12 school year. 

Last but not least, the CGH has created the Stanford-NBC Fellowship in Media and Global Health in order to teach future clinicians to use different forms of media to advocate for global health and help lessen health inequities. The inaugural fellow, Joyce Ho is a Stanford second year medical student who was selected through a national application process. She will be working in various media settings including with Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Chief Medical Correspondent for NBC News, NING - a new social media platform, the Journal for Health Affairs, and Mark Tuschman, a photojournalist.  She will also complete training programs through the Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism and with the Kaiser Family Foundation.

All in all it has been a busy quarter. As they say it takes a village---none of these activities could be realized without the help of the Center for Global Health core working team.

Safe travels for the summer.

Most sincerely,

Michele Barry

2010 Spring Issue: June 1, 2010

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

First, I would like to thank the Stanford community again for the generous contributions you have made to Haiti. Ian Rawson, PhD, Managing Director of Hôpital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) visited Stanford in late April to thank us all for the contribution as well as discuss future plans for post-disaster relief. I felt it was important to build upon the monetary support that Stanford provided with manpower and expertise and wrote a one-year pilot program grant to send residents and career physicians to HAS through the Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholars Program. I am happy to announce that the grant has been accepted and I will be traveling with my colleague and Stanford surgeon, Sherry Wren, for an exploratory trip in early June and to ensure that it is a safe site for our residents and faculty.

It has been exactly a year since I arrived at Stanford as Senior Associate Dean for Global Health.  My strategy team, led by Dave O’Brien and an internal advisory board, has worked hard to help me brand and develop a strategic plan for cross-disciplinary dialogue to occur across the university around global health issues.  We are beginning to accomplish this through the following projects/programs:

1. To ensure that we keep the global health community in the know of what is currently going on in global health on campus, in the bay area, nationally and globally, we now send out a digest every second Friday which links directly to the new global health website launched last March. If you would like to receive calendar events, funding opportunities and global health headlines, you can sign up on the homepage.
2. We will be launching the Mary Biddle Duke (MBD) Clinical Scholars Program for Pediatrics. This fund will support students, residents, faculty and fellows to care for pediatric patients in underserved areas overseas.  More information on eligibility criteria will be announced in late fall of 2010.  A rotation in Oaxaca, Mexico and in Salinas, California working with migrant farm workers is being developed for this Scholars Program with Dr. Gabriel Garcia.
3. Having co-founded the Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholars Program, I am pleased to announce we will be funding 60 residents and career physicians in the 2010/2011 cycle to build capacity at our ongoing overseas sites in Liberia, Eritrea, Borneo, Uganda and South Africa. Nineteen Stanford physicians will be participating: five career physicians, four pediatric residents, one emergency medicine resident and nine internal medicine residents.  Consider applying for the 2011-2012 academic year. Visit thewebsite for more information on how to apply.

The second group of the Global Health Corps (GHC) fellows have been chosen.  The GHC, an NGO which is aligned with Partners in Health (PIH), the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) and Covenant House International and co-sponsored by FSI and the Office of Global Health will conduct its summer orientation training, July 11-24, 2010 at the Bechtel Conference Center. Recently graduated university students are encouraged to apply. Visit the website to learn more about eligibility and how to apply.

Three new Global Health educational courses are currently in progress.

1. Globalization’s Impact on Health Inequities: Local and Global. The reading list and materials for this course are available online. The course ends June 22nd.
2. Health Sequelae of Climate and Environmental Change is sponsored by our Office of Global Health, ITI and the Woods Institute. All upcoming talks are available online.
3. A Case Based Tropical Medicine Course run by Dr. John Kugler and Dr. Brooke Cotter.  This course is preparatory for all clinical practitioners going overseas.

Lastly, it gives me pleasure to announce that Dr. Brian Blackburn will assume directorship of the International Health Scholarly Concentration. I want to thank Dr. Julie Parsonnet for all her past service and look forward to working with Brian on how to best offer our students research opportunities overseas.
I also look forward to continuing the growth of Global Health at Stanford and to working towards global health well-being worldwide.

Sincerely,

Michele Barry
Senior Associate Dean for Global Health
Director for the Center for Global Health
Stanford University

2010 Winter Issue: February 1, 2010

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

My first informational newsletter has to begin with gratitude and amazement at the generosity of the Stanford community for Haiti. I literally started my global health career in 1981 working at a small hospital in Deschapelle, Haiti called Hôpital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) so it feels full circle to have been able to ask the Stanford community to donate to help this hospital. HAS is 40 miles outside of the capital city and has stayed open during this terrible tragedy. The challenge match ended on January 31st and a total of $1,870,820.03 was donated by Stanford affiliates which exceed the pledged amounts of $179,500 by the University, Hospital and Clinics, School of Medicine and Departments of Anesthesia, Pathology, Radiation Oncology,Radiology, Surgery, Pediatrics, Microbiology and Immunology, Research,Neurology, Neurosurgery, Ophthalmology, Orthopedic Surgery, Urology,OB/GYN, Genetics, Medicine, Stem Cell Institute and OHNS.  It was with trepitude that I jumped after many years at Yale to a newly created dean's position at Stanford. This response makes me feel as if I made the right choice.
   
I have been simply overwhelmed by the enthusiasm around global health exhibited by students and faculty at Stanford. Building upon this interest and with the help of many, many folks, the Office of Global Health has been able to kick-start the following activities:

A cross-departmental medical center/university global health interest group  which meets quarterly to create dialogue amongst faculty with active global health programs; A new global health library web portal with resources able to be accessed while working overseas and linked to a global portal of Stanford which enables searches of ongoing courses, projects and faculty by country of interest spearheaded by our new dedicated global health librarian Lauren Maggio.

The merger and training of the first Yale/Stanford Johnson and Johnson Global Health Physician Scholars going to Liberia, Eritrea, Borneo, Uganda and South Africa. Open to faculty and residents from all departments. Minimum of six-week rotation/salary covered with additional stipend and housing. Visit the website for more information and to apply.

The development of Mary Duke Clinical Scholars for residents and students of pediatrics interested in Global Health enabling overseas clinical rotations. Eligibility criteria will be announced in the spring 2010. 

The anchoring of the training institute program for the Global Health Corps (GHC) , a new NGO which is aligned with Partners in Health (PIH), the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) and the Covenant House International --co-sponsored by FSI and the Office of Global Health. Visit the website to learn more about eligibility and how to apply. Also, follow the first GH Corps fellows by reading their blog.

A new Medical Grand Round Series in Global Health: Speakers below (To watch past grand round presentations, please click here. To view Global Health Grand Rounds symposium schedule, please click here)

Michele Barry - Why Global Health: Why Now; Why Here at Stanford -- September 23, 2009
Sir Richard Feachem - Shrinking the Malaria Map: 1900 to 2025 -- January 27, 2010
Professor Peter Singer from University of Toronto--Can global health technology save the world? -- April 21, 2010
Regina Rabinovich --- Gates Foundation Global Health Initiatives -- June 2, 2010

Other educational courses planned or started:

A seminar series sponsored by the Office of Global Health, ITI and the Woods Institute on Health Sequelae of Climate Change and the Environment

A case-based tropical medicine series (for residents across departments. Faculty and fellows may also "audit" sessions)

A seminar series on Globalization's Impact on Health Disparities: Inequities (for residents across departments. Faculty and fellows may also "audit" sessions)

I look forward to growing global health activities at Stanford with the hope of making global health the goal and not simply a discipline of study!

Sincerely,

Michele Barry
Senior Associate Dean for Global Health
Director for the Center for Global Health 
Stanford University

2010 Winter Issue: February 1, 2010

Dear Global Health Colleagues,

My first informational newsletter has to begin with gratitude and amazement at the generosity of the Stanford community for Haiti. I literally started my global health career in 1981 working at a small hospital in Deschapelle, Haiti called Hôpital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) so it feels full circle to have been able to ask the Stanford community to donate to help this hospital. HAS is 40 miles outside of the capital city and has stayed open during this terrible tragedy. The challenge match ended on January 31st and a total of $1,870,820.03 was donated by Stanford affiliates which exceed the pledged amounts of $179,500 by the University, Hospital and Clinics, School of Medicine and Departments of Anesthesia, Pathology, Radiation Oncology,Radiology, Surgery, Pediatrics, Microbiology and Immunology, Research,Neurology, Neurosurgery, Ophthalmology, Orthopedic Surgery, Urology,OB/GYN, Genetics, Medicine, Stem Cell Institute and OHNS.  It was with trepitude that I jumped after many years at Yale to a newly created dean's position at Stanford. This response makes me feel as if I made the right choice.
   
I have been simply overwhelmed by the enthusiasm around global health exhibited by students and faculty at Stanford. Building upon this interest and with the help of many, many folks, the Office of Global Health has been able to kick-start the following activities:

A cross-departmental medical center/university global health interest group  which meets quarterly to create dialogue amongst faculty with active global health programs; A new global health library web portal with resources able to be accessed while working overseas and linked to a global portal of Stanford which enables searches of ongoing courses, projects and faculty by country of interest spearheaded by our new dedicated global health librarian Lauren Maggio.

The merger and training of the first Yale/Stanford Johnson and Johnson Global Health Physician Scholars going to Liberia, Eritrea, Borneo, Uganda and South Africa. Open to faculty and residents from all departments. Minimum of six-week rotation/salary covered with additional stipend and housing. Visit the website for more information and to apply.

The development of Mary Duke Clinical Scholars for residents and students of pediatrics interested in Global Health enabling overseas clinical rotations. Eligibility criteria will be announced in the spring 2010. 

The anchoring of the training institute program for the Global Health Corps (GHC) , a new NGO which is aligned with Partners in Health (PIH), the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) and the Covenant House International --co-sponsored by FSI and the Office of Global Health. Visit the website to learn more about eligibility and how to apply. Also, follow the first GH Corps fellows by reading their blog.

A new Medical Grand Round Series in Global Health: Speakers below (To watch past grand round presentations, please click here. To view Global Health Grand Rounds symposium schedule, please click here)

Michele Barry - Why Global Health: Why Now; Why Here at Stanford -- September 23, 2009
Sir Richard Feachem - Shrinking the Malaria Map: 1900 to 2025 -- January 27, 2010
Professor Peter Singer from University of Toronto--Can global health technology save the world? -- April 21, 2010
Regina Rabinovich --- Gates Foundation Global Health Initiatives -- June 2, 2010

Other educational courses planned or started:

A seminar series sponsored by the Office of Global Health, ITI and the Woods Institute on Health Sequelae of Climate Change and the Environment

A case-based tropical medicine series (for residents across departments. Faculty and fellows may also "audit" sessions)

A seminar series on Globalization's Impact on Health Disparities: Inequities (for residents across departments. Faculty and fellows may also "audit" sessions)

I look forward to growing global health activities at Stanford with the hope of making global health the goal and not simply a discipline of study!

Sincerely,

Michele Barry
Senior Associate Dean for Global Health
Director for the Center for Global Health 
Stanford University