Global Health Sciences

Global Health Sciences (GHS) is dedicated to improving health and reducing the burden of disease in the world's most vulnerable populations. Directed by Dr. Haile T. Debas, GHS integrates research, clinical, and training expertise in all of the health, social, and biological sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

The GHS Pilot Research Award Program was launched in October 2005 when investigators from both UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley came together to present their international research. The common themes that emerged during this fall research day symposium are provided for reference. This seminal event resulted in a generous gift to support innovative research in global health. The UCSF AIDS Research Institute and the Maurice Galante Distinguished Professorship have since matched this donation.

From December 7, 2005 to January 17, 2006, we invited letters of intent for our first Innovations in Global Health Pilot Research Awards from investigators soliciting seed funding to conduct innovative pilot research in global health. These awards are for interdisciplinary, integrative global health research, which addresses significant knowledge gaps, and that encourages collaboration among researchers from different disciplines across the UC Bay Area network. It was expected that these Award funds would be used to initiate research that would lead to larger NIH, or similar, future funding. At least one award will be made to a proposal addressing research related to HIV/AIDS, and one for a proposal related to surgery.

Research Principles and Values

I. How We Conduct Research (values):

• In a manner that avoids ethnocentricity and imperialism
• By considering applied, integrative or trans-disciplinary science (TDS) that combines prevention and treatment, and which leads to specific outcomes and to policy
• By involving the communities in which we work through community-based participant action research (CBPR) and ensuring community ownership

II. Capacity Building:

• In other countries, by minimizing brain drain and maximizing in-country sustainability
• At home through:
• Development of shared infrastructure locally and abroad (e.g. biospecimen banking)
• Working to modify the University bureaucracy to facilitate international research

III. Training Through Research:

• Increase collaborations across existing training programs through shared materials, strategies and workshops
• Catalogue training programs (those that exist as well as future opportunities)
• Increase funding for international research opportunities for local and foreign students, residents, doctoral students, post docs and fellows
• Facilitate sandwich and twinning programs that support exchanges of faculty and trainees

IV. Specific Cross-Cutting Topics:

• Behavioral/psycho-social themes:
• Stigma
• Religion and faith-based research
• Mental health, grief
• Cheap drugs for developing countries (using both state-of-the-art and local solutions)
• Interations between western and non-western medicine
• Integrating economics and biomedical research
• Part of trans-disciplinary research, but also part of other endeavors (e.g. the economics of drug development)
• Social capital
• Cancer-Infection-Culture/Transmission and Prevention
• HIV/AIDS

V. Themes From a Previous, Preliminary GHS Research Meeting:

• The impact of globalization on health including the role of multinational corporations
• Development in terms of the life cycle
• Social class disparities and health risks across a spectrum of outcomes
• Gender inequalities and health risks across a spectrum of outcomes