A School of Public Health program that trains future generations of public health researchers in China has been awarded a grant renewal of $1.25 million from the Fogarty International Center, of the National Institutes of Health, to continue its work.
Since 2011, Associate Professor Kaveh Khoshnood, Ph.D. ’95, M.P.H. ’89, has led a team at Yale and at Central South University (CSU) in Changsha, China, with a focus on bioethics training. The new funding will support the development of a novel interdisciplinary Master of Bioethics (MBE) program at CSU.
The goal of the MBE program is to train a cadre of Chinese health-focused policymakers, practitioners and researchers to understand and create solutions to a variety of bioethical challenges faced by China today. The program is led by faculty at CSU, many of whom were trained at Yale with support from Khoshnood’s “Research Ethics Training and Curriculum Development Program with China” Fogarty grant.
“The new MBE program at CSU is one of a kind,” said Khoshnood, who also serves as the director of the BA-BS/MPH Program in Public Health at Yale. “We hope this program becomes a catalyst for similar programs in other universities in China and elevates the importance of bioethics in China.”
The new MBE program at CSU is one of a kind.
Kaveh Khoshnood
The grant will also help the program continue its work developing an integrated Human Research Protection Program (HRPP), which will act as a resource for investigators and policymakers conducting research at CSU and elsewhere in Hunan province. The HRPP will integrate the two newly established institutional research boards at the Xiangya Schools of Nursing and Public Health with longer-established research boards at the Xiangya School of Medicine and its three affiliated hospitals. It will develop a formal process to monitor, evaluate and improve the protection of participants in research conducted by CSU investigators.
Finally, the grant establishes a Bioethics Training Institute at CSU, which will offer courses and workshops to train a variety of health professionals in Hunan province in a variety of bioethics issues that have an important impact of their work.
Together, these programs will be supported by the grant renewal through 2022. The original grant provided by Fogarty in 2011 awarded Khoshnood $1.2 million to begin the program. Close to 20 Chinese scholars have been trained since the program’s inception.