We propose to establish a Support Center (Consortium) involving University of California- Berkeley, Yale University, Stanford University and Florida International University to train postdoctoral fellows, PhD graduate students, and medical students for them to develop a long- term career in global health research. The main objective of the program is to generate a new and young cadre of global health researchers, educators, and professionals who will be prepared to address the new challenges in global health that arise from our constantly changing planet, in particular, those challenges that emerge from the world's burgeoning human settlements known as slums that have developed in urban and rural communities of many low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Slum-specific factors associated with chronic, noncommunicable, as well as infectious diseases, environmental health hazards, risks specific to women and children, intentional and unintentional injuries, and mental disorders are poorly understood, and there are not many researchers dealing with these issues. These diseases comprise a large proportion of the world's health problems. Our training program will emphasize a multidisciplinary, problem-based approach using slum health as a platform to expose trainees to the new concepts, models, and approaches to global health research. The training will be conducted at US government-funded field research sites at 10 locations abroad, including Central and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and Eastern Europe, where the Consortium mentors have been conducting research for more than 3 years. The Consortium includes a large reservoir of postdoctoral fellows and upper division graduate and medical students who will be candidates for the training program. The Consortium has made a special effort to identify potential trainees from under-represented minority groups and it has thus partnered with Florida International University, the largest Hispanic-serving institution in the continental US, which also has a large pool of African-American students. Thus, this research training program will provide an opportunity to draw highly skilled researchers from diverse backgrounds from a wide spectrum of disciplines, who will use the knowledge gained from this program to develop their own research agenda to improve the lives of people who are exposed to a wide range of interacting health risks that engender new global health challenges.
This is a grant application proposing to establish a training program comprised of four institutions-University of California at Berkeley, Yale University, Stanford University, and Florida International University (called Consortium)-designed to train postdoctoral fellows and upper division graduate and medical students to launch them into a career in global health research. The program will emphasize training through participation in ongoing projects of long-term researchers of the Consortium at 10 sites in low and middle-income countries (LMIC),that revolves around the theme of health problems of informal human settlements known as slums. Through this problem-based, participatory and multidisciplinary training approach, the trainees from the US and LMIC will experience and learn about global health and how to engage themselves in long-term research.
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