2020 updates from the Center for Global Health Studies

January 15, 2020

Greetings from the Center for Global Health Studies (CGHS) at Fogarty! As the Center's director I am delighted to share with you some highlights from 2019 and a preview of 2020 projects.

Three medical workers perform surgery in Zambia.

A CDC cholera investigation team crosses a river in a white SUV in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

Photo credits:
Courtesy of the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative
Courtesy of Dr. Krista Pfaendler
By Pallyana Ventura/Getty Images
By Ashley Greiner, CDC/CC BY 2.0

We held a meeting of the Adolescent HIV Prevention and Treatment Implementation Science Alliance in Uganda in February 2019. With additional funding from the NIH Office of AIDS Research we awarded collaborative contracts to catalyze long-term and sustainable country-specific implementation science alliances in sub-Saharan Africa.

In April 2019 CGHS sponsored publication of a special collection on stigma research and global health in BMC Medicine. The articles in this innovative series cover cutting across disease and population silos to improve our understanding of how different stigmas interact, and of implications for effective interventions. We’re currently planning a training institute on stigma research in low-resource settings at NIH in June, with applications to participate due February 10.

Advancing Emergency Care Research in Low- and Middle-Income Countries , another CGHS-sponsored publication series, which published in BMJ Global Health last July, resulted from a workshop we convened to explore barriers and opportunities for conducting research in emergency care settings in LMICs.

In November we hosted the workshop Childhood Obesity Prevention Across Borders: The Promise of US-Latin American Collaboration. We’re coordinating a journal supplement to articulate a shared research agenda addressing childhood obesity prevention in Latin America and among Latino populations in the U.S. In addition, CRDF Global on behalf of Fogarty is soliciting collaboration award proposals to promote new collaborations between and among U.S. and Latin American investigators.

Last year we continued to build our expertise and engagement in implementation science. CGHS senior scientists served as faculty for trainings sponsored by NIH and the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD). Our staff also co-chaired the global track at the annual conference on dissemination and implementation science. Through ESSENCE on Health Research, a consortium of global health funders, CGHS helped support the development of best practices for funders supporting implementation science.

Also in the coming year we are supporting the development of models to estimate the burden of chronic diseases in people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. This work will be published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society and will launch at the AIDS 2020 conference in July. We will also continue to catalyze health research in humanitarian crises through the publication of case examples describing how research has been conducted in these challenging settings, and through a pilot global forum for humanitarian health research together with our partners Wellcome Trust, the U.K. Medical Research Council and Canada's International Development Research Centre.

The impact of our work depends greatly on our partnerships with Fogarty colleagues, other NIH ICOs and outside scientific advisors. We are deeply appreciative of their contributions and look forward to continuing these collaborations in the coming year.

Best wishes for 2020,

Nalini Anand, J.D., M.P.H.
Director, Center for Global Health Studies