From the Global Health Director's Desk

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 Biddle programs 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 Sachs offered 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