The University’s Academic Priorities Committee approved the creation of a new Center for Global Health Equity within the Division of Biology and Medicine, according to a Today@Brown announcement last month.
The CGHE succeeds Brown’s Global Health Initiative, which was created in 2009. Over the past 15 years, the GHI has focused on training and mentorship, including establishing training grants funded by the National Institutes of Health, Senior Vice President for Health Affairs and Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Mukesh Jain wrote in an email to The Herald.
While the GHI primarily focused on supporting medical students, the CGHE aims to “expand this focus” to include clinical residents, fellows and undergraduates studying biology and medicine, according to the announcement.
“We wanted to grow it into a center which actually has more permanence,” CGHE Director and Professor of Emergency Medicine Adam Levine said in an interview with The Herald.
The announcement stated that CGHE aims to bridge “gaps in global health knowledge and practice” in multiple fields, including technological innovation, refugee health and global health ethics through programs that combine “rigorous academic training” and “practical field experience.”
Currently, the CGHE has programs in nearly 50 countries around the world, Jain wrote. This includes the Brown University Ukraine Collaboration, which aims to “work with Ukrainian health providers to address the challenges of the HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics for children, women and their family members in Ukraine.”
The new center also hopes to facilitate collaboration between faculty, according to Levine. Approximately 60 faculty members at the Warren Alpert Medical School are currently involved in global health education or research, though they are spread out across 20 different departments, he added.
“We wanted a way to bring them together and also connect them with counterparts in other schools at the University, like the School of Public Health or the School for International and Public Affairs,” Levine said.
The CGHE will also oversee all of the University’s international medical exchange programs. Every year, between 80 and 100 medical students travel between Brown and these institutions across the globe for additional training, according to Levine.
One of the CGHE’s priorities is ensuring that their partnerships bring a diverse array of views to the table, including international partners, underrepresented voices and “local community members who might be the objects or subjects of research, but are very rarely involved in the actual design of those projects,” Levine said.
While the CGHE receives some funding from philanthropic gifts and foundation-based grants, many individual faculty research projects rely on financial support from agencies like the NIH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Agency for International Development, Levine added.
On Feb. 14, the Trump administration laid off 10% of the CDC’s workforce. Last week, the administration blocked NIH health officials from providing public notice of grant review meetings. The NIH funding freeze has already impacted approximately 16,000 grant applications totaling approximately $1.5 billion in funding requests.
On Sunday, the administration placed nearly all of the agency’s workers on administrative leave, with the exception of leaders and critical staff.
“It’s likely that if funding cuts are allowed to proceed, they would impact CGHE’s federal grant portfolio,” Jain wrote.
Levine said that “this is a time to diversify your funding sources,” adding that much of the center’s future work will require “filling some of those gaps that are being left by the federal government.”
Levine believes this uncertainty has created a sense of fear and anxiety both nationally and at Brown.
“The more that we can do to try and provide resources and support, to hold the hands of our faculty and students as we get through this time together, to build a sense of community that helps them not feel completely alone in this world, I think is going to be very, very important,” he said.
Aniyah Nelson is a University News editor overseeing the undergraduate student life beat. She is a senior from Cleveland, Ohio concentrating in Political Science and Sociology. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music and watching bloopers from The Office.
