Duke President Richard Brodhead Speaks of Global Health in India

President Richard H. Brodhead and other Duke officials traveled to New Delhi and Mumbai on Oct. 9-16, 2008, to build upon the university’s many existing ties with India.

While there, President Brodhead gave an address to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry on “Finding and Educating Global Talent.”  In that speech, he referred to many wonderful aspects of Duke’s educational programs, including the Duke Global Health Institute. Excerpts of the speech are below. The full text is available on the Duke News website. 

EXCERPTS:

India and the United States both know how unprecedented levels of biomedical discovery and sophisticated care can coexist with an unmet burden of human health need. The solutions to this great challenge require the cross-breeding of sciences that used to be quite separate: biology and chemistry, engineering, computer science, and the rest. But our health problems are also and inextricably legal problems, since they involve questions of intellectual property; business problems, problems of economics and management; policy problems; and they also have a cultural or anthropological dimension, since different cultures embrace diagnoses and cures on profoundly different terms.

Let me outline some of the ways we seek to train the sort of versatile, collaborative talent I’ve been describing.

At most American universities, global health is pursued in a separate public health school or as a field within medicine. But Duke’s distinction is that we have built our Global Health Institute as a university-wide initiative, a space for biomedical researchers, nursing professors specializing in innovative care delivery and caregiver training, business faculty with expertise in health management, as well as health sociologists and health economists, all joined together by their devotion to a common problem and inspired by what they can learn from those who don’t share their expertise.

In the Global Health Institute, this collaboration is not reserved for the faculty. Students in all fields participate in its programs, down to and including first-year undergraduates. The collaborative spirit also reaches outside our university, since we know we can’t meet any significant challenge all by ourselves. Though still a young venture, the Global Health Institute is working with academic and non-academic partners across the United States and in many foreign countries, India among them. Michael Merson, the Director of our Institute, has worked in India for over twenty-five years, since his days as Director of the World Health Organization’s Global Program on AIDS. He and his colleagues are now involved with Indian researchers and service organizations in Hyderabad, Tamil Nadu, New Delhi, and elsewhere and are in active conversation with your colleagues in the Public Health Foundation India.

To read the president’s blog during his trip to India, click here.