Global Infectious Disease Research Training Program at UVA

University Of Virginia, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application to renew our Global Infectious Disease Research Training (GIDRT) program at the University of Virginia will build upon our many lessons learned and track record working over many cycles of International Training and Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (ITREID), Actions for Building Capacity (ABC) and GIDRT Fogarty support that has so greatly strengthened our research and training collaboration with the Federal University of Cear¿ (UFC) in Fortaleza, Brazil. This experience is the strong foundation for strengthening our collaboration with the University of Venda (UNIVEN), a model, innovative, former homeland university in Limpopo Province in the northeast of South Africa, near the borders with Zimbabwe and Mozambique. UNIVEN is clearly poised to become a world-class research, teaching and service university, much like UFC was in northeast Brazil 20 years ago. Furthermore, UNIVEN attracts graduate students from other southern African countries such as Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Like South Africa, these countries are also experiencing acute shortages of trained individuals to help seek solutions to their particular human development problems. We believe our experience and lessons learned in Brazil have begun to take root at UNIVEN. We also believe that the transfer of our GIDRT program from Brazil to South Africa provides an opportunity to firmly establish infectious disease training at a site with limited training opportunities, a large burden of diseas, and a small, but growing research infrastructure. At UNIVEN, we have, in close collaboration with Dr. Pascal Bessong, formerly a Fogarty-supported trainee who is now Chair of Microbiology at UNIVEN, developed a cutting edge research program as well as research infrastructure. We have achieved this in part through our collaborative major Malnutrition and Enteric Disease Network (MAL-ED) study. This project, funded by an award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), has supported Dr. Bessong, as he has led the establishment of a major new site for study of diarrheal illnesses and their long-term consequences. Given this success, we are now poised to take intervention science - applying our best science to testing novel approaches to disease control and improving health - to a whole new level by linking the laboratory bench to the bedside to the community and, importantly in our model, to come back from the community to the bench to elucidate novel interventions.