The Duke Global Health Institute is helping faculty build research international global health research collaborations with institutional partners through the Small International Travel Grant program. This fall, DGHI has awarded grants to Nadia El-Shaarawi (Kenan Institute for Ethics), Liping Feng (OB/GYN), Catherine Lynch (Emergency Medicine), and Elizabeth Turner (Biostatistics and Bioinformatics) for travel to the Middle East, Asia, South America and Africa.
Nadia El-Shaarawi will travel to Amman, Jordan to develop and pilot a study that explores how policies that provide solutions for refugees affect their mental health and post-conflict recovery activities, like political participation and developing social and community networks. The work will focus on Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Cairo, Egypt and Amman. She will also meet with policymakers, practitioners, NGOs and other providers of psychosocial care to refugees.
Liping Feng, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, will travel to Shanghai, China to build an interdisciplinary research team focused on environmental exposures that women are exposed to before, during and after pregnancy. Feng will work with researchers at Shanghai Fifth Hospital, Fudan University in Shangai. This team aims to investigate the environmental factors which complicate pregnancy and women’s health then develop and assess interventions that alleviate them. Researchers will begin with a study to quantify DEHP and DBP environmental contaminants in blood samples from pregnant women.
Catherine Lynch, assistant professor of emergency medicine and global health, will travel to Tucuman, Argentina to continue building partnerships to address at-risk populations for injuries and violence such as road traffic accidents, homicide and suicide. She and collaborators from Tucuman Province Ministry of Health are studying the impact of injury on mortality and morbidity in the province. They are also assessing the current safety-related attitudes, social norms and practices among men and women She will also evaluate the quality of health care delivery for injured patients in the pre-hospital and hospital settings.
Elizabeth Turner, medical instructor of biostatistics and bioinformatics and global health, has received funding to visit Tanzania to identify the quantitative and statistical needs of DGHI faculty members working in the Duke- Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre Collaboration. While in Moshi, she will also determine how to best leverage the DGHI Biostatistics Core to support KCMC researchers. She will also visit a team of public health entomologists at Ifakara health Institute in Bagamoyo, Tanzania to build collaborations in malaria research.
