IGH research students offer their experience, ideas and solutions to global health issues

Written by Lydia Franklinos on behalf of the IGH Student Blog Committee

In an increasingly connected and interdependent world, social inequalities, political unrest and environmental degradation occurring in one region can have a widespread impact across the globe. Indeed, the major global health issues we face today include dramatic health income gaps within and between countries, an increasing burden of chronic diseases, particularly in developing countries and, the detrimental effects of a rapidly changing environment. Furthermore, increasing global mobility and expanding transport networks enable infectious diseases to spread further and faster resulting in pandemics that become more difficult to control. Understanding and providing solutions to global health problems is complex and requires a cross-disciplinary approach. Furthermore, as major issues continue to evolve with our changing planet, the broad remit of ‘global health’ can make it prone to fragmentation and vagueness. As IGH research students, we want to document some of these changes, challenges and tensions in the field of modern global health and discuss what can be done to tackle some of these growing issues.

IGH prides itself in taking a cross-disciplinary approach to global health problems and this is reflected in the diverse expertise of the students, who have backgrounds in biomedical science, epidemiology, disease ecology, social sciences and humanities, policy and law. Each of us has a unique perspective and we have created this blog as an informal and engaging platform to talk about global health-related topics through our work as research students. Our blog will cover topical global health issues that our research addresses, conferences and symposia that we attend, experiences during our research degrees, student life and getting to grips with academia.

We understand that solutions to global health problems come from collaborating with communities at all levels, so we hope our blog engages not only global health practitioners, but also members of the public, researchers from other disciplines and prospective students alike.

IGH Students at the Annual PhD Student Conference