A helping hand for global health care
By Ryann Collins
Cavalier Daily Associate Editor
Following quick on the heels of the three-year-old Harrison Undergraduate Research Awards, another research scholarship has emerged on the scene. The University's newly established Center for Global Health will be doling out between five and 10 stipends, primarily for undergraduates, to combine research and community service in an impoverished community during the summer or fall of 2002. The awards will range between $2,500 and $5,000.
"The purpose of the scholarship is two-fold," Center for Global Health coordinator Breyette Lorntz said. "We want to give the University a compass for internationalizing itself as well as encourage multi-disciplinary collaboration across the University centered on health."
Recipients will work with a mentor in their major to address a global health issue, state-side or internationally, through both a service and an academic focus.
"We're trying to encourage mentors to give independent study or research credit to students who write about their experience when they return," Lorntz said.
She added that the goal of the scholarship is to address health in its broadest sense by confronting issues ranging from sexual health to water policy to mental health to human rights.
"A confusion is that it's for pre-med majors, and it's not," Lorntz said. "It's for all majors. A limited number of awards will go to graduate and professional school applicants as well."
The idea for the scholarship program grew out of a long-standing medical school initiative headed by Richard Guerrant, chief of the University's Division of Geographic and International Medicine. For more than 20 years, the division has sent selected fourth-year medical school students abroad to work within their field, initially to Northeast Brazil and more recently to any developing country in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Guerrant is a University medical school graduate who participated in a similar program as a student that sent him to Congo. After coming to the University, Guerrant launched the Brazil program and later received a grant from the University's dean of geographic medicine to continue the initiative.
"Since its inception in 1978, more than 80 medical students have gone to work abroad during their fourth year on a geographic medicine grant, and 17 are scheduled to go this year," Guerrant said.
In addition, the division's program brings junior faculty from abroad to the University for a year to work and learn.
"We're looking to build collaborative relationships between people, which is really what matters in my opinion," Guerrant said.
Guerrant was the driving force behind the inception of the Center for Global Health, and the new University-wide scholarship fund is based on the medical-school model of sending students abroad and bringing faculty here.
"The reason for the asymmetry - they send junior faculty and we send students - is that if we bring international students here, they wouldn't return to their own countries, and we'd be contributing to the brain-drain," Guerrant said.
In addition to the scholarship fund, the Center for Global Health is developing undergraduate and graduate majors.
"We want to make global health more visible at the University," Lorntz said.
Applications are available on the Center's Web site and will be distributed on the Lawn during the week of Dec. 3. They are due Jan. 25 to Breyette Lorntz at the Corner Building on Main Street.
In addition, an information session for the scholarship will be held Dec. 5 at 7 p.m. at the International Residential College.
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