Professor Rashid Bashir and graduate student Gregory Damhorst are helping lead an effort to coalesce a campus research community around global health issues.
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A Bioengineering professor and graduate student are helping lead The Global Health Initiative, a new effort during the 2011-2012 academic year that aims to coalesce a research community on campus around global health issues and to create capacity for future interdisciplinary work on global health research.
Professor Rashid Bashir, from Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering, and Gregory Damhorst, an MD/PhD who is pursuing a doctorate in Bioengineering, are on the team organizing the initiative.
The initiative plans to:
Promote seminars with recognized scholars in the area of global health
Organize a symposium on campus research and campus-community partnerships (locally and internationally)
Provide first-hand exposure to global health issues for graduate students and faculty
Create a Global Health Center on the Urbana-Champaign campus
In addition, students and faculty from the University of Illinois will travel in January to Ghana to do observational research of the challenges to health care in a resource-limited setting.
This project is being organized by a team of graduate students and faculty led by Professor Andiara Schwingel, from Kinesiology and Community Health; Lily Mahapatra, an MD/PhD in Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Medical Scholars Program; Professor Bashir; and MD/PhD student Damhorst.
The Initiative has been awarded a Focal Point grant from the Graduate College, and three student organizers have been awarded the O’Morchoe Leadership Fellowship from the College of Medicine to participate in aspects of the project.