Each spring, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies offers awards through the Kempf Memorial Fund, which supports faculty in organizing on-campus conferences, workshops, and lectures on international topics in their fields of interest. The MacMillan Center also offers Faculty Research Grants, which are awarded for studies that will increase understanding of specific countries and societies in the modern era; for problem-oriented and comparative studies within and between regions; and for studies in international relations and global affairs.
Two faculty affiliated with the Yale Institute for Global Health (YIGH) received awards this spring. Robert Hecht, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), was awarded a Kempf Award and Faculty Research Grant to launch a new partnership between YSPH and the Cambodia National Institute of Public Health (NIPH). The partnership will include development of a new Masters in Public Health at NIPH with a concentration in health economics, which Yale faculty will help to teach in the early years as the program is handed over to national faculty; joint research activities; and the translation of research results to national health policies and programs in Cambodia.
“The country has made remarkable progress over the past two decades in fighting infectious diseases and putting in place a strong primary health care system, but Cambodia still faces many challenges as it confronts growing non-communicable diseases and new pandemic threats and strives to build strong universal health coverage for all of its 17 million citizens. NIPH, with Yale support, can play a central role in building Cambodia's health system,” said Hecht.
The MacMillan awards, totaling nearly $38,000, will be used in the next 12 months to bring NIPH faculty to Yale to attend classes, deliver seminars, and design the new NIPH MPH curriculum; and to enable YSPH faculty to travel to Cambodia to work on site at NIPH. At the end of the award period, the NIPH-YSPH partnership will submit a multi-year proposal to prospective agencies for funding to implement the new MPH in Cambodia.
Dr. Julia Rozanova, Associate Research Scientist, and Dr. Sheela Shenoi, Associate Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) from the Yale AIDS Program at the School of Medicine, in collaboration with Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood from the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health and Dini Harsono from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA), were awarded a Kempf Award from the Macmillan Center to host a series of events titled: “Managing Health during Humanitarian Crises: Resilience, Establishing Health Priorities, and impact on Health Care Workers”. This proposal builds on collaborative NIH-supported research with colleagues from Ukraine that has characterized poor health outcomes among older adults with HIV and is developing and piloting interventions to improve outcomes. Rozanova and Shenoi and their Ukrainian collaborators have been adapting their trials to the humanitarian setting since the start of the war with Russia. The proposed series of events will engage US and international scholars and leaders in humanitarian crisis work and discuss the impact of humanitarian crises among health care workers and strategies to strengthen health care services. The series of events will characterize research gaps and develop a research agenda for future work by facilitating discussions on potential synergies and collaborations.