The Department of Global Health is committed to training health professionals from diverse communities and helping to fund the education of such students. Recipients are selected by committee based on academic merit, a deep personal experience with, and connection to, diverse cultures, and demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity within the field of global health.

The capital of the Peruvian Amazon is only accessible by water or air travel, leaving it inherently isolated from the world. This city, Iquitos, Peru is the largest in the world that cannot be reached by road. Because of its geographic limitations, Iquitos also faces several logistical challenges, something postdoctoral fellow Olaf Recktenwald became very familiar with in his time spent studying the effects of communal meeting spaces on a floating river population’s mental health conditions.

Even successful methods for diagnosing, treating and caring for people who are suffering from cancer are not enough without effective, practical tools and guidance for putting those methods into practice.

Esther Choo and Andrew Secor, Department of Global Health PhD students in Implementation Science, interned for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation during the summer of 2019. Choo served as part of the Global Delivery Program and Secor worked with the Qualitative Sciences initiative under the Integrated Development Team.

“My main project focused on health systems and seeing if we can draw lessons from past experiences, while also thinking of ways we can improve evaluation methods going forward,” Choo said.