Global Health Emerging Scholars Program

PROGRAM SUMMARY The objective of our LAUNCH program is to continue our global health research training program called the Global Health Emerging Scholars (GHES) designed to create a new community of researchers, educators, and professionals who are prepared to address new and emerging global health challenges. We will build on the last nine years of this training program to create a cadre of new researchers who will dedicate their careers to address the health problems that arise out of the human conditions prevalent in informal settlements (slums) in urban and rural areas. Rather than focusing on individual diseases, we aim to train scholars in a comprehensive, integrated, and multidisciplinary approach to addressing health challenges in informal settlements. This approach has been developed over many years through collaboration among faculty from the four U.S. partner institutions—Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Arizona, University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University—led by global health research leaders with over a decade of collaboration. Together, core faculty mentors from these institutions conduct research at 25 institutions in 20 countries in Africa, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Pacific, and Eastern Europe. The GHES program will address a wide range of health research topics including HIV/AIDS, emerging and high-consequence infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases (NCD), environmental health, mental health, interpersonal violence, substance use, and injuries, all within the framework of informal settlements health. Training will target US postdoctoral fellows and pre-doctoral students and low- and middle-income country (LMIC) postdoctoral fellows. We will recruit 9-10 trainees/year with 60% of them as US postdoctoral fellows. Trainees will spend 8-12-months at an LMIC site under the supervision of the Consortium and their collaborating LMIC mentors. Didactic workshops on global health research methods will be conducted both in-person and online. LMIC trainees will spend 2-3 months at US institutions to undergo training in methods not provided at their institutions. All trainees will be provided with research and career mentorship throughout their training and tracked for career development after completing their GHES-supported research work. This program exposes trainees to a key global health theme—diseases in at-risk populations in informal settlements, both urban and rural, and offers them the opportunity to become experts in this emerging discipline. Ultimately, the program will cultivate a new generation of global health researchers and leaders equipped to tackle the growing health challenges in impoverished communities across LMICs.