The Department's Goals, Values, and Priorities
Our overall goals are to:
- Build a world-class department to help meet the needs of our students, trainees, and faculty and to prepare them for global health work;
- Create an organizational structure to address teaching (education, training, and mentoring), research, and service (technical assistance and development); and
- Help bring together the many largely unconnected global health-related activities at the UW to create complementary or synergistic interdisciplinary programs that address the causes of and solutions for global health disparities.
Our values include:
- Collaboration: The department should promote and create collaborations in global health at the University of Washington in Seattle and internationally.
- Multidisciplinary programs: The department should create a new model for an academic department in which many disciplines are included in all of the missions of the department.
- Partnerships: The department should form partnerships with existing global health programs at the UW and within the local and international community. The department should bring added values to the University community.
- Innovation: The department should develop creative approaches to addressing global health issues and developing educational programs.
- Opportunism: The department should build on existing strengths at UW. Examples include: distance learning programs, infectious disease research in HIV/AIDS and other important pathogens (e.g., malaria), breadth and diversity of experience in faculty and student exchanges, Global Health Research Center, student global health interests, and action-oriented learning, research, and service.
- In-country partnerships: The department must understand the importance of developing international partnerships. Efforts should primarily be focused in developing countries.
- Themes: The department should foster pursuit of the highest priorities in global health.
- Accessibility: The department's educational and service programs should have a campus location.
- Social Equity: The department should always work to promote social justice and health equity and respect for disadvantaged individuals and populations
- Mission: The department must have a strong academic research focus (broader than biomedical), as well as outstanding international education, training and service programs.
Our initial priorities have been defining the interests, needs, and opportunities in global health across all of the UW schools and colleges, beginning to meet the needs of students and trainees, and beginning to build a strong sustainable infrastructure for global health. Our next priorities are to make strategic choices in selecting programs for development as UW Global Health Centers of Excellence. Much has happened already toward that end, including a campus-wide solicitation for global health interdisciplinary centers and initiatives that elicited 41 proposals from every school and college on campus.
