University of California Global Health Institute
Updates
The UC Global Health Institute was officially launched on November 9, 2009 at a forum held at UCSF about the importance of global health to California (watch archived webcast). The UCGHI also released a report on global health’s impact on California. The report, which included a letter of endorsement from Governor Schwarzenegger, found that global health represents more than a $75 billion impact on the California economy.
The University of California Global Health Institute (UCGHI) will connect California and the world through:
- Education for training future leaders to serve California and the world;
- Research that galvanizes science across multiple disciplines to address global health problems;
- Partnerships for action-oriented collaborations and interventions that improve health of vulnerable populations everywhere; and
- Innovative uses of technology to enable collaboration across campuses, learning across the globe, and research in remote settings.
The Vision
Recognizing the long-standing and emerging challenges to global health, the University of California Global Health Institute will create multi-campus, transdisciplinary Centers of Expertise to address these challenges through a novel problem-based and action-oriented approach. By integrating and leveraging the diverse intellectual capacity of faculty on the ten UC campuses, this groundbreaking University-wide initiative will focus on producing leaders and practitioners of global health, conducting innovative research, and developing international partnerships to improve the health of vulnerable people and communities in California and world-wide. The Institute will take advantage of cutting-edge technology to enable teaching and research and to connect faculty, researchers, students and partners around the world.
Centers of Expertise
The Institute will be composed of multi-campus Centers of Expertise (COE) that will lead UC-wide education programs and develop targeted multi-campus research endeavors and sustained partnerships for implementing programs and interventions.
After a competitive application process in which 12 teams of faculty across the UC system proposed multi-campus centers, three were chosen to create the foundation for the Institute:
- Migration and Health, led by Steffanie Strathdee, PhD, chief of the UC San Diego Division of Global Public Health, and Marc Schenker, MD, MPH, Public Health Sciences professor at UC Davis, with partner campuses Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz;
- One Health: Water, Animals, Food and Society, led by Patricia Conrad, DVM, PhD, professor in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, and Anil Deolalikar, PhD, economics professor at UC Riverside, with partner campuses Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz;
- Women’s Health and Empowerment, led by Philip Darney, MD, UCSF professor and chief of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Health Sciences at San Francisco General Hospital, and Paula Tavrow, PhD, director of the Bixby Program in Population and Reproductive Health at UCLA School of Public Health, with partner campuses Berkeley, Davis, Irvine and San Diego.
The COEs, in coordination with the administrative core led by Dr. Haile Debas at UCSF, will spend the 2009-2010 academic year planning education, research and partnership programs.
Education
The UCGHI will offer a variety of education programs, beginning with a one-year master’s degree that is expected to enroll students in Fall 2011. Eventually two-year master’s and PhD programs will be launched. The COEs will lead the development of these programs and design field site projects for students at partnership sites.
Planning
UCSF Global Health Sciences administers a two-year planning grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to plan and validate the concept of the Institute, which represents the first phase in creating an eventual UC-wide School of Global Health. Over 150 faculty from across the UC system have been involved in planning discussions over the past two years, and an Executive Committee and Steering Committee are being created to solicit ongoing input from all 10 campus.
Funding
The Institute will be self-supporting and will depend on gifts, grants and revenue from enrollment fees. Development efforts are currently underway to obtain additional start-up funds for the UCGHI and its Centers of Expertise.
Contact: ucghi@globalhealth.ucsf.edu