BU begins $10m global health effort

The new Center for Global Health and Development will connect specialists from BU’s medical and public health schools with engineers, social workers, and educators on the main campus - all to grapple with diseases that cause millions of deaths each year in the developing world.

Robert A. Brown, BU’s president, said he will make the announcement at the national consortium’s inaugural conference today in Bethesda, Md., on the National Institutes of Health campus. Brown will be one of five university presidents attending the gathering of academics from 58 North American universities that have significant international programs in health and development.

“In many ways, for a research university this is really the next frontier,’’ Brown said in an interview. He said top research universities that built themselves on national agendas after World War II “have become very international and global over time.’’

BU is strengthening the program amid surging interest among faculty and students to pursue research and careers related to global health. A survey being released at the conference shows that the number of students enrolled in global-health degree programs has doubled in the past three years. The survey, carried out at 37 of the participating universities, found undergraduates in the field increased from 1,286 to 2,687, with graduate students more than doubling to 2,010 this year.

Those schools have a vast international reach, with 302 programs for training and research in 97 countries. New England is heavily represented, with five universities in the region offering major global health programs: Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, and Yale in addition to BU.

BU’s new center will be headed by Dr. Jonathon Simon, chairman of the International Health Department in BU’s School of Public Health, which already is conducting 50 applied research studies in 22 countries. Simon is an expert on child survival, and was a lead researcher on a decade-long project that led to new global guidelines on how to treat pneumonia in children.

The new center will merge BU’s international health center, headed by Simon, with its Global Health Initiative, which works to broaden the reach of global health programs beyond medicine. Simon said the consolidation will strengthen the multidisciplinary approach to improving global health by tapping expertise throughout the university.

Dr. Gerald Keusch, director of the Global Health Initiative, has been a leading organizer for the new Consortium of Universities for Global Health. He joined the BU faculty in 2004 after serving as director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health.

Simon and Keusch, who have worked together for more than 20 years, both said the new center would deepen the links between BU’s South End medical campus, which is home to the schools of medicine, dentistry, and public health, and the main campus on the Charles River.

That cooperation already has led to new degrees such as a dual master’s in international relations and international health, and to projects such as one in the School of Fine Arts to make cultural education part of better health care in India. Keusch said BU has focused especially on working with India in reforming its public health education.

Such innovative thinking is occurring at many of the universities in the new consortium, which is being supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Keusch said the organization will give members a way to share best practices on multidisciplinary training and research and market their research capacity and research proposals to the US government’s aid agency, USAID, which has tended to award grants to private management groups rather than to universities that have the capacity to do the field research.

Simon said BU’s commitment to the global health center is $2 million per year for five years, which he will use to hire new faculty. In addition, Simon already has $8.5 million in research grants committed to the new center, and grant applications are pending on issues including neonatal and child health.

The university’s support, at a time of financial hardship, will be a powerful signal to foundations and other donors that BU is committed to global health education and research, Simon said.

Another strength for BU, he said, is that its new high-security biomedical laboratory in the South End will give the center the capacity to pursue the most demanding research, from distant villages all the way to state-of-the-art molecular work in the lab. The $198 million National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, begun in 2006, is mostly complete but still empty while it faces legal challenges from area residents.

Simon said interest in the global health field at BU has exploded. The international health department is now the largest in the School of Public Health. He has 85 students in his introductory course, “which has grown by leaps and bounds,’’ he said. “It is for some of our students the issue of our times.’’

Brown said it was an easy decision to invest in the new center.

“What you see in students today, and it’s not just ours, is a global awareness, a larger sense of place than their parents and grandparents, in the way they approach the world,’’ he said.