Brown launches its Global Health Initiative
Ask her about global health work at Brown University, and Dr. Susan Cu-Uvin has little trouble running off the details.
She might mention a bilateral exchange program with Kenya, and the fact that family medicine at Memorial Hospital has helped to set up family medicine residency programs at a number of medical schools in Vietnam.
There are many more such efforts around the world, she said, but Brown’s work toward global health is not widely known.
“You’d be surprised at the amount of work being done in clinical and basic research, policy research and education, that Brown is involved with in terms of global health,” said Cu-Uvin, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and medicine at The Miriam Hospital and The Warren Alpert Medical School. “People just don’t know.”
Susan Cu-Uvin
That will change this week, Cu-Uvin hopes, with the University’s launch of its Global Health Initiative (GHI) — an effort that will both link and enhance a number of individual global programs already under way. Cu-Uvin, the newly appointed director for GHI, said the program will also help overcome barriers and provide a coordinating vision and purpose to the University’s existing efforts.
Brown’s GHI is a multidisciplinary, University-wide effort to reduce health inequalities among underserved populations locally and worldwide. The combined effort promotes education, research, service and development of partnerships to reach its goals. It will also promote translational research, education, and clinical care with overseas partners in order to extend its academic and community service mission around the world, Cu-Uvin said.
The Division of Biology and Medicine is hosting the Global Health Initiative Inaugural Symposium and Celebration on Tuesday, Sept. 29, with a series of presentations from 4 to 6 p.m., and a reception to follow at Marcuvitz Auditorium in the Sidney E. Frank Hall for Life Sciences. The new GHI office will be on the fourth floor of Arnold Laboratory.
The new GHI intends to give a higher profile to the global health programs that have long operated on their own and in separate departments. It will also enable Brown to pursue grants and other funding for its global health programs more effectively, by linking the programs under one central umbrella.
“We wanted to have a visibility within the University of all the global health related work that is being done,” Cu-Uvin said. “It was so individualized that there was no identity for global health.” Dr. Edward Wing, dean of medicine and biological sciences, is one of several administrators, faculty members or researchers who will serve on the GHI executive committee. He said he is “passionate about global health,” and that the milestone of opening a GHI office comes after he has had a “personal interest” in the issue for more than 20 years.
Wing said the new office should energize global health efforts at the University through greater coordination. “We have established the new Global Health Initiative to focus the energy of students and faculty at Brown for research and care of patients world wide, and to coordinate all the global health related programs across campus.”
Members of the GHI Executive Committee include:
- Dean Edward Wing, M.D., dean of medicine and biological sciences
- Dr. Charles C.J. Carpenter, director, Center for AIDS Research
- Dr. Kenneth Mayer, director of the Fogarty Program
- Dr. Timothy Flanigan, director, Chester Immunology Center, The Miriam Hospital
- Dr. E. Jane Carter, director of the Brown-Kenya Program
- Dr. Jeffrey Borkan, chief of family medicine, Memorial Hospital
- Dr. Stephen McGarvey, director, International Health Institute
- Dr. Daniel Smith, associate professor of anthropology
- Dr. Michael White, professor of sociology and director, Population Studies and Training Center