Rebecca Stoltzfus

 

Kathleen Rasmussen

 

Warren Johnson

Two faculty members in the Division of Nutritional Sciences, Professors Rebecca Stoltzfus and Kathleen Rasmussen, have joined with two faculty members at Weill Cornell Medical College, Warren Johnson and Daniel Fitzgerald, to develop a "Framework Program for Global Health" in response to an NIH-sponsored initiative.

The health problems to be studied transcend national boundaries, disproportionally affect resource-poor individuals, and are best addressed with multidisciplinary approaches. This new program will encourage researchers to engage in greater collaboration around issues in global health while providing both new courses and internship opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and medical students.

On the Ithaca campus, this will be visible as a minor in global health that will be available to undergraduates in several colleges. This minor will involve both existing courses and new courses to be created specifically for it. One of them, a gateway course for the minor, will be multidisciplinary and problem-focused so that specific, selected problems in global health with be approached from a variety of perspectives. It will be taught by a team of faculty members from several colleges including CALS.

Over time, a senior seminar and universitywide seminar will be added to the proposed curriculum. In addition to the possibility of conducting laboratory-based research on issues related to global health with researchers on the Ithaca and New York City campuses, internships will be available to qualified students for study in Bangladesh, Ghana, Peru, Tanzania, and at three sites in Brazil.