More than 300 people helped the Duke Global Health Institute celebrate its fifth anniversary on Monday. The day-long event served as a milestone in the Institute's history and highlighted Duke's efforts to address health disparities at home
and around the world.
The symposium, titled "Global Health 2020: Acting Today to Improve Tomorrow," and evening reception provided a great opportunity for faculty, students, trainees, staff and friends of DGHI to celebrate and reflect on the Institute's achievements and look ahead to what the future holds. Watch a recorded webcast of the symposium.
"The Duke Global Health Institute has not just thrived at Duke; it has thrived so much that is has come to illustrate the aspirations of this university. It illustrates the kind of connectivity we seek with one another," said President Richard Brodhead, who traveled to DGHI sites in Tanzania, Uganda and China this summer. "When I want to describe a program that shows how the university puts together the domains of knowledge and takes what is learned and reach out in the domain of human need and be of use, I can always find an example from DGHI. So to everyone who has made it so: fantastic. Let's come back for the tenth anniversary and it will be ten times better."
World leader in health and DGHI advisory board member Peter Piot opened the symposium with his keynote address entitled "Global Health 4.0." He emphasized that global health has evolved greatly in recent years, and now includes an expanded scope of health issues beyond tropical diseases and AIDS. Academic institutions like Duke are responsive to this change.
"Let me congratulate Mike Merson and all your colleagues at the Duke Global Health Institute on an incredible job," said Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. "What the Institute and Duke is trying to do is quite unique in terms of global health both in terms of the "what" and "how," and really pushing the boundaries of the practice of global health. DGHI is really anticipating the big problems of our time."
The keynote was followed by three panel discussions with Duke faculty and their partners whose work is reducing health disparities in places like China, East Africa, India, Haiti and South America. Discussion was focused on chronic diseases, environmental health issues, and building capacity to strengthen health systems - all of which are topics of growing global importance and concern.
- A webcast of the symposium will be accessible later this week here.
- See photos from the event.
- See media coverage from ABC 11 and the Duke Chronicle.
- Check out the event's strong social media presence using Twitter.
an international leader in global health. In June 2005, the Committee, which was led by Bart Haynes and Bob Cook-Deegan, issued a report recommending the creation of a Duke Global Health Initiative. The following year, the Provost and Chancellor decided to establish the Duke Global Health Institute, which was to be a university-wide institute that would "train the next generation of global health leaders and foster the development of interdisciplinary faculty teams to solve complex global health problems." In November 2006, I had the privilege of being recruited to Duke to direct the Institute.
