The COVID-19 pandemic put global health at the top of news headlines, but it has long been a priority at McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. The Faculty’s game-changing tuberculosis research is just one example of McGill’s contributions to the health of populations in Canada and around the world.
The McGill School of Population and Global Health builds on that extraordinary expertise and maps out a bold path forward.
The interdisciplinary School brings together Biomedical Ethics, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill Global Health Programs and the Institute for Health and Social Policy – along with their highly ranked graduate programs – and aims to train leaders, reduce health inequities, and foster high-impact research and education.
Dr. Tim Evans (pictured below) is Director and Associate Dean at the School, Associate Vice-Principal (Global Policy and Innovation), and also executive director of the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force established by the federal government in 2020. “In my view, the big vision is that Canada, and Canadian institutions by association, can play a much more significant role with respect to global health…I think McGill is in a great position to move that needle.”
Building donor support will help with ambitious plans for the School. Evans and colleagues aim to create a state-of-the-art undergraduate program to respond to growing demand from students for training in global health, and a new master’s program in global health entrepreneurship. They want to increase diversity so that the School’s student population reflects the global communities that they will serve. And they are looking to build partnerships with front-line agencies in Canada and around the world, and train leaders to help ensure preparedness for future global health emergencies.
Creating future-ready health expertise for the world
The School’s flagship McGill Global Health Programs already offer students global learning opportunities: enriching outside-the-classroom experiences made possible by generous McGill donors.
Because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, 2020 Undergraduate Global Health Scholars like Samir Gouin (pictured at top of page) worked remotely on their projects. “Despite the barriers of research in a pandemic era, I was fortunate to work on the Namibia Children’s Worlds project this past summer,” Gouin writes of his experience in McGill Perspectives on Global Health.
The project administered a survey to students in Grades 4 and 6 in the Khomas region that examined their satisfaction at school, home and in their neighbourhoods.
“My supervisors encouraged me to step out of my academic mindset and write for an audience that would benefit from the research results,” notes Gouin, who received the Leduc, Davis, Brun, & De Rito Undergraduate Award for Global Health.
“By coordinating with a local youth magazine, we were able to develop a culturally responsive comic [strip] that highlighted some of the integral findings from the survey,” adds Gouin, a neuroscience major who is passionate about examining how well-being differs around the world.
Global Health Scholar Nardin Farag spent two months in Ecuador in Summer 2019, working alongside community health workers in Indigenous communities to understand challenges to implementing micronutrient programs.
“If you want to learn about global health, what my professor, Dr. Madhukar Pai, would always say is that you don’t fully understand what global health and health inequities are unless you have the opportunity to go on-site and see it yourself. After this experience, I can say the same,” says Farag, who was supported by the Joseph I. Wolfsdorf Fund for Global Child Health.
“Travelling gives you the drive to put your thoughts into concrete actions,” she says. “I think that we are extremely lucky to have such a program open to undergraduate students. It provides amazing opportunities to build partnerships at an international level and work on sustainable projects with great supervisors.”