This award focuses on providing support to enable health and medical geography scholars and students from developing nations to attend the 15th International Medical Geography Symposium (IMGS) at Michigan State University in July 2013. The theme of the 2013 IMGS will be Sustainability of Health and Health Care Systems, a theme that covers a broad range of contemporary and emerging population health needs around the world. The IMGS is a biannual meeting of health and medical geographers from countries around the world that enables researchers to discuss their recent research and teaching techniques. The first IMGS was held in 1985 in Nottingham, England, and thereafter, it has been held in the United States, Canada and European countries. There is a recognized need from within the discipline to more actively recruit health and medical geographers from developing nations, especially Africa south of the Sahara, Latin America, and central and southeast Asia in order to extend the exchange of knowledge and techniques and to provide additional learning opportunities for geography faculty and students from within those regions. NSF funding will provide support for faculty researchers and students from these underrepresented regions of the world to enable them attend the 2013 IMGS and participate in the global discourse of the discipline.
The 2013 International Medical Geography Symposium will provide the opportunity for health and medical geographers from throughout the world to exchange information about the health status of their regions and their respective research in order to address these health problems. Health and medical geographers are recognized within the broader disciplines of human and veterinary medicine and public health for their use of theoretical approaches and skills that help evaluate disease diffusion and disease clusters, conduct health risk assessments and locate-allocate healthcare services. The 2013 IMGS will help improve knowledge of health around the world and the advancement of practices within the field of health and medical geography. The exchange of ideas about new education and training approaches will increase the potential to positively impact the mentoring of future health and medical geographers. The discourse among 2013 IMGS participants from developed and developing nations will increase the potential for future collaborations among health and medical geographers from around the world and will increase opportunities for future participation of scholars and students from all nations in future symposiums.
The International Medical Geography Symposium is a biannual global conference of health and medical geographers who convene to present and discuss state-of-the-art research and training in respective specialty areas. Historically, scholars from the global south have been underrepresented at these symposiums. The purpose of this National Science Foundation (NSF) grant was to recruit health and medical geography scholars and students from universities in the global south to attend the 2013 International Medical Geography Symposium at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan (July 7-12, 2013). Fourteen travel grants ($3,000) were awarded to scholars (8 faculty and six students) from the countries of Brazil, Ghana, India, Malaysia, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippians, Senegal, Tanzania and Tunisia. The scholars and students presented their research at the symposium alongside colleagues from the global north. There were many opportunities to interact on a range of topics in the field of health and medical geography. At the end of the conference the scholars and students were invited to publish their presented research in Special Issues of the 2013 International Medical Geography Symposium in the journals Social Science and Medicine and Health and Place and are now included in all communication about future symposiums. The intellectual merit resulting from the 2013 International Medical Geography Symposium was the advancement of health and medical geographic research and training in the areas of acute and chronic diseases, emerging global health issues and the sustainability of healthcare systems in the world. The broader impacts resulting from 2013 International Medical Geography Symposium were the ability for colleagues from the global north and south to interact and exchange information about their respective countries and international and global research. Through this interaction new ideas on how to improve public health were exchanged; a new generation of health and medical geographers were trained; and highlights from the symposium are being broadly disseminated to professionals within and outside of field of geography specifically, human and veterinary medicine and public health.
