Global Health Equity Scholars Program.

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PROGRAM SUMMARY The objective of our LAUNCH program is to continue our global health research training program called the Global Health Equity Scholars (GHES) designed to create a new community of researchers, educators, and professionals who are prepared to address new and emerging global health challenges. We will build on the last nine years of this training program to create a cadre of new researchers who will dedicate their research careers to address the health problems that arise out of the inequity of human conditions prevalent in informal human settlements (slums). Rather than addressing one disease at a time, we propose to provide a comprehensive, multidisciplinary and integrated approach to deal with urban and rural informal human settlement health issues, developed over many years by the participating faculty members of this program. This program will comprise four US partner institutions (Consortium)--Yale University, Stanford University, University of Arizona, and University of California at Berkeley, each led by a leader in global health research with more than 10 years of collaboration among themselves. Together, core faculty mentors from these institutions conduct research at 25 institutions in 21 countries, representing regions of Africa, Central and South America, the Caribbean; Asia, the Pacific, and Eastern Europe. The GHES program will address a wide range of health research topics including HIV/AIDs, emerging and high- consequence infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases (NCD), women’s health, environmental health, mental health, interpersonal violence, substance abuse, injuries, and the interaction of all of these health issues within the framework of slum health. Training will target US postdoctoral fellows and pre- doctoral students and low and middle-income country (LMIC) postdoctoral fellows. We plan to recruit 9-10 trainees/year with 60% of them as US postdoctoral fellows. The trainees will spend 8-12-months at an LMIC site under the supervision of the Consortium and their collaborating LMIC mentors. Didactic workshops on global health research methods will be conducted both in-person and online. LMIC trainees will spend 2-3 months at US institutions to undergo training in methods not provided at their institutions. All of the trainees will be provided with research and career mentorship throughout their training and tracked for career development after completion of their GHES-supported research work. Thus, under this program, we expect the trainees to be exposed to one important theme in global health research--health equity--through research that deals with health concerns of vulnerable populations residing in informal human settlements, and provide them with an opportunity to become experts in this new global health discipline. The overall impact of this training program is, therefore, to create a new cadre of global health researchers and leaders who address the emerging health issues arising out of ever-expanding informal human settlements of LMICs.