The Sten H. Vermund Award for Excellence in Global Health recognizes the graduating medical student who has most demonstrated a strong commitment to improving the health of the people of or from low- or middle-income countries through distinguished scholarship, education, and/or contributions to the improvement of clinical care. The award was established in 2017, to honor Dr. Sten H. Vermund who was the founding director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health.

Effective teaching, mentorship, and leadership skills are essential for faculty success in academic medicine, but these skills are rarely taught in medical school and residency training programs, particularly in low-resource settings. To address this gap among anesthesia educators in Ethiopia, a 13-week course was developed and piloted in a virtual platform from September 2020-January 2021.

Severity of illness, history of stroke, and being divorced or widowed were independently predictive of delirium in hospitalized patients in Zambia, according to a study published in PLOS ONE.

In continuing, longstanding research collaborations between the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) and Bayero University Kano (BUK) in Kano, Nigeria, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH), the three institutions are partnering on a new Infrastructure Development Training Program from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The project will strengthen infrastructure capacity in research administration and research ethics in Nigeria.

Two Vanderbilt University Medical Center faculty and a 2017 alumna of the Vanderbilt School of Medicine Master of Public Health program have recently been recognized for their global health accomplishments from the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH).

Working in collaboration with faculty from UEM, the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) will work to build UEM’s institutional research capacity with support from the NIH Fogarty International Center (FIC).

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center investigator is hoping to improve access to HIV testing in South Africa, where more than 7 million people are known to have the virus, by training traditional healers to perform the tests. Carolyn Audet, PhD, assistant professor of Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy and Institute for Global Health, has partnered with Ryan Wagner, PhD, a research fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, to develop a novel HIV testing strategy for individuals living in rural communities.

World Health Week at VUMC  February 22 - 25 (virtual events) Presented by VU School of Medicine Global Health Organization World Health Week is a week dedicated to spreading awareness about global health and features panels and talks given by prominent clinicians involved in global health. This year’s theme is “Global Health and Pediatrics”. Listed below is the schedule; click on the RSVP / Anchor Link event for more details about each speaker.

The Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) has received a new research grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and Fogarty International Center of the NIH to establish a large childhood status epilepticus (SE) cohort in northern Nigeria with key partners Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) and Bayero University, and with the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa.