4.c. Implementing Pathways to Global Health

Global health is an area that can connect all parts of Emory University in its mission of research, teaching, and service. Indeed, the global health challenges of the 21st century cannot be met by narrow biomedical research and technology. Understanding the determinants of health and designing appropriate responses requires intellectual resources and skills from all sectors of the University community.

Global health necessarily involves issues like human rights, the quest for social justice, mental health, creative sharing of information, prevention of violence, politics, trade policy, sustainable use of resources, globalization, promotion of economic development, and the expansion of human potential through education. Global health also requires an important service component – knowledge creation alone is insufficient without efforts to put knowledge into action in partnership with people from other countries. Partnerships need to be based on mutual respect and equality. Emory needs to work with others to support their development in the broadest sense of the word.

Emory is unique in that it is the only university in the world to have the world’s major public health institution only a few yards down the road. It also has easy access to the world’s major disaster relief organization and the world’s leading center for the prevention and care of cancer. It has the untapped linkages of The Carter Center. With added resources, by 2015, Emory will have new creative and productive ways of integrating academic units. Partnerships with the CDC, The Carter Center, CARE, and other Atlanta institutions will be strengthened. Multidisciplinary research efforts and centers will have expanded markedly. Students and faculty will be working on the ground in countries all over the world. Emory will be known as the U.S. university global health leader that is the best listener and partner for collaborative efforts.

Emory will create a Global Health Institute (GHI) to serve a leadership and coordination function. Faculty affiliated with the GHI will have primary appointments in existing departments. The GHI will act as:

  • Coordinating center

  • Location for nurturing new collaborations

  • Source of seed funding for new projects

  • Facilitator of curricular innovation

  • Central contact for the management of international collaborative arrangements

  • Lively intellectual meeting ground for multidisciplinary discussion and debate on topics of global health, broadly defined

Because of its crosscutting functions, an important aspect of the GHI’s mission will be to make sure all units of the University, insofar as they desire, are able to actively contribute to the University discourse on global health. This endeavor will serve a collaboration-promoting and coordination role and will not replace or displace existing programs, departments, or structures.

EMORY AND ITS SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIC, RESEARCH, AND MAJOR UNITS WILL:

  • Increase the number of postdoctoral fellows and senior fellows, recruiting international scholars from diverse disciplines to spend significant time in residence at Emory

  • Develop the administrative infrastructure to support new initiatives

  • Identify resources that enable scholars to meet regularly to discuss common topics in the area of religion and the human spirit, and engage in collaborative research

  • Create new academic appointments in some of the schools and new programming

  • Develop interreligious literacy programs that engage Emory undergraduates in academic and existential understanding of religious traditions other than their own

  • Develop a visiting fellows program that brings together both academics and religious leaders throughout the world who study and are actively engaged in practices of conflict mediation and reconciliation

  • Create a College of Fellows in Religion, housed within the Graduate Division of Religion, which could host 20 postdoctoral fellows in the broad range of religious studies

  • Evaluate the University’s current initiative in the area of race and difference to create a blueprint for action and create a timeline with measurable, achievable actions, and associated resource needs to transform the University

  • Explore ideas of race and difference at the unit level, and begin to plan individual unit participation in the creation of this initiative

  • Develop a Center for the Study of Race and Difference, including a repository of information and scholarship that addresses topical matters on a two-year rotating basis

  • Develop the infrastructure necessary to support the Global Health initiative, including identifying a leader with a substantial and independent budget who works as an equal with various deans to leverage faculty appointments and create innovative synergies in research, service, and teaching