In 2021, due to the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center for Global Health and Social Responsibility (CGHSR) announced an innovative Global Engagement Grants program to support work that blends research, education, and capacity building.
Especially in a time when global travel is not possible, supporting collaborations across our local and global community is crucial to continuing global health work to meet community needs, combat newly emerging crises, and address long-standing systemic inequities.
"Traditional research and capacity building efforts in global health have been curtailed with COVID-19. This can add to the sense of further isolation,” said Shailey Prasad, MD, MPH, executive director for CGHSR. “As a center, we feel that ongoing engagement is key in global health and we wanted to encourage our faculty to look at newer forms of engagement in global health. While these are not exclusively in global health research, the goal is to continue to build bridges with our colleagues in other countries."
Through the new Global Engagement Grants program, CGHSR aims to support collaborations between local and international teams. One such example is the work of Nida Sajid, PhD, in the College of Liberal Arts, who will explore the impact of waste management facilities on community health and biodiversity during the COVID-19 pandemic in Goa, India. Her team is examining the reciprocity and intersectionality in public health by creating an innovative model of collaborative research, capacity building, and active learning. This project will foster long-term mutual partnerships with academic institutions and local communities in India by incorporating longitudinal research and a bidirectional learning model.
