Gillings School Alumna Awarded Fogarty Global Health Fellowship
August 1, 2017
Gillings School of Global Public Health
Amy Huber, 2017 alumna in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, is one of 18 recipients of a 2017-2018 UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellowship. The fellowship provides training opportunities in global health research for selected junior faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and predoctoral scholars.
The UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellows Program, administered through a consortium of UNC-Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins, Morehouse and Tulane (UJMT), is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH recently renewed funding through 2022 to support mentored training at 16 affiliated sites in low- and middle-income countries.
The coordinating center for the program, directed by Benjamin Chi, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, is based at the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases. Other institutional directors include Yuka Manabe of Johns Hopkins, Kofi Kondwani of Morehouse and Pierre Buekens of Tulane.
Huber will live in South Africa for one year, working on the project, “Are They Really Lost? Tracking Transfers and Lost to Follow Up HIV-infected Individuals Through the South African National Health Laboratory Service Database.”
“The project,” Huber said, “aims to assess the accuracy of and calculate a corrective factor for clinic-level loss at ten public health clinics in South Africa.”
The fellowship has a successful track record in training the next generation of global health researchers, both from the U.S. and abroad. Over its first five years, the program supported 132 doctoral and postdoctoral trainees.
More than half of the postdoctoral fellows have taken academic positions after completing the program. Many have successfully competed for research funding, including from the NIH, to become independently funded investigators.
In the 2017-2018 academic year, the program will receive approximately $1 million from the NIH to support 18 trainees. Of these, nine are doctoral students and nine are postdoctoral fellows; five are foreign nationals working at one of the consortium’s affiliated sites.
Trainees receive stipend, travel and research funding as part of their 12-month appointment, where they conduct research at an established international site. They are mentored by experts across a wide range of scientific areas and disciplines, including HIV/AIDS, noncommunicable diseases, emerging infections, cancers, mental health, neurologic disorders and women’s health.
Funding in 2017-2018 will come from different institutes/centers within the NIH, including the Fogarty International Center; the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; the National Institute of Mental Health; the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; the National Institute of Nursing Research; and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
More information about the program can be found at the UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellowship website.