Spring 2026 Spark Award Recipients Announced

The Yale Institute for Global Health (YIGH) Global Health Spark Award provides up to $10,000 in seed funding biannually to support innovative global health projects led by YIGH-affiliated faculty. Designed to catalyze new collaborations, pilot studies, and community partnerships, the award helps investigators launch projects with the potential to grow into larger, sustainable initiatives that improve health outcomes around the world.

Since its launch in 2021, the Spark Award program has supported projects addressing a broad range of global health challenges, including cancer care capacity building in Ghana, suicide prevention initiatives in Pakistan, cervical cancer follow-up systems in Mexico, and epilepsy care programs in Armenia.

The program has demonstrated a substantial return on investment, with Spark Award recipients having gone on to secure NIH and other federal grants, expand international research and clinical partnerships, publish manuscripts and abstracts, develop educational and training initiatives, and generate preliminary data that has supported larger-scale studies and long-term implementation efforts.

This spring, YIGH awarded funding to five faculty-led projects. Projects proposed by Josefa Martinez, PhD and Melanie Sion, MD received support through YIGH, while projects led by Ninani Kombo, MD, Ghada Elhadari, MBBCh, PhD, and Alice Miller, JD were funded through a partnership with the Yale Office of International Affairs through the Yale and the World Partnership Fund, an initiative designed to strengthen international collaborations that advance research, education, and practice on issues of global significance.

Awardees were selected based on innovation, feasibility, sustainability, anticipated outcomes, and alignment with YIGH’s mission to improve the health of individuals and populations worldwide. The recipients and project descriptions for the Spring 2026 cycle are below.

Fathers Teaching Fathers: Co-Design of a Peer-to-Peer Mobile Health Intervention for Responsive Parenting and Feeding
Josefa Martinez, PhD – Associate Research Scientist in General Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine

Project Description: This project is co-designing a father-centered mobile health intervention for the perinatal period that blends peer support with two-way text messaging. Guided by the WHO/UNICEF Nurturing Care Framework, it will share practical skills in responsive parenting, infant feeding, and breastfeeding support, while also supporting fathers’ mental health and improving outcomes for mothers and infants. Our team is holding community listening sessions across Connecticut with fathers, partners, peer educators, and program leaders to identify what education, communication, and social support families value most. What we learn will guide the development and future pilot testing of a scalable, father-focused intervention to strengthen breastfeeding, early childhood development, and family well-being.

Igniting A Professional Development Program for African Women Surgeons
Melanie Sion, MD – Assistant Professor of Surgery (General, Trauma & Surgical Critical Care), Yale School of Medicine

Project Description: African women surgeons practicing in Africa face significant gender-based challenges such as discrimination, exclusion, skepticism, and social and family discouragement. These challenges can lead to burnout, limit advancement into leadership, and create a cycle that slows progress. We are co-creating Collective Wisdom in Action, a professional development program to support African women surgeons practicing in Africa that is culturally and contextually aware, relevant, and impactful for cohorts of women surgeons. We aim to foster leadership skills, self-awareness, and a supportive network. In partnership with the Association of Women Surgeons Foundation, Women in Surgery-Africa, the Pan-African Association of Women Surgeons, we will also develop a concept framework for future programs to adapt and build on from the African continent for women surgeons.

Phacoemulsification Surgical Training for Residents in Rwanda
Ninani Kombo, MD – Associate Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Science, Yale School of Medicine

Project Description: The majority of cataract surgeries in Rwanda and Sub-Saharan Africa are performed using a manual technique. While manual cataract surgery remains the best option for some patients, phacoemulsification can offer important advantages for many patients but is limited by a shortage of surgeons trained in the technique. This 12-month surgical curriculum combines synchronous and asynchronous lectures, and in-country surgical training. It will serve as the launching point for the training of the first cohort of residents from Rwanda International Institute of Ophthalmology who will graduate as phacoemulsification surgeons and serve their communities locally and nationally.

Adapting a National Intimate Partner Violence Protocol into an Emergency Department Screening and Response Toolkit in Egypt.
Ghada Elhadari, MBBCh, PhD – Associate Research Scientist in Emergency Medicine, Yale School of Medicine

Project Description: Violence against women, including intimate partner violence (IPV), is a major but understudied public health problem in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean Region. This project brings together collaborators from Yale, Suez Canal University, and national and regional partners to adapt Egypt’s national IPV protocol and referral pathway into an emergency department–appropriate screening and response toolkit. A three-month assessment will examine Emergency Department (ED) visits related to intimate partner violence (IPV), women’s awareness of available support resources, and how acceptable confidential IPV information and referral approaches are. These findings—together with evidence from the literature and a multi-stakeholder consultation involving experts in emergency medicine, public health, healthcare leadership, providers, and national and regional partners—will guide refinement of the toolkit, workflows, and training. We will then conduct an initial usability and acceptability assessment among ED providers to inform implementation planning. By strengthening healthcare system capacity and cross-sector collaboration, the project aims to improve support for women experiencing violence and inform future scale-up efforts in Egypt and across the region.

Co-Constructing a Gender-Responsive Psychosocial Intervention with Colombian Adolescent Girls Recruited by Armed Groups Who Experienced Sexual and Reproductive Violence
Alice Miller, JD – Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale Law School

Project Description: Despite decades of armed conflict in Colombia that recruited nearly 18,000 children, no study has focused on the specific mental health needs of girl former child soldiers who experienced sexual and reproductive violence while enrolled in these groups. As a result, this population remains invisible in both research and programming and lacks support as they attempt to reintegrate into their communities. This Spark Award funds a convergent mixed-methods study that, for the first time, will center these adolescent girls' voices in designing a mental health intervention: using in-depth qualitative interviews and validated psychosocial surveys with 15-20 girl participants, caregivers, and institutional stakeholders, and translating those findings into participatory co-construction workshops where the girls themselves shape the content, language, and delivery of an adapted evidence-based intervention. The project will be carried out through an interinstitutional alliance linking Yale's Global Health Justice Partnership and Boston College's School of Social Work. It is timed to leverage Colombia's 2026 transitional justice proceedings, during which former FARC leaders publicly acknowledged systematic sexual violence against recruited girls, creating an unprecedented window for victim-centered action. Led by Alice Miller at Yale University and doctoral student María Alejandra Gutiérrez-Torres at Boston College, the study will produce the first intervention protocol adapted with and for this population.