Center for Global Health
Putting people first
The promise of global health requires us to address some of the most complex and difficult challenges facing humans. Sustainable solutions will need to address not just the medical, but also the complexly inter-related social, cultural, political, ecological and economic challenges we face in a globalized era. Our research, training and outreach efforts in global health are about understanding and supporting communities as they identify and manage the health challenges they define as priorities. Located in the school that has the nation’s foremost research-intensive anthropology program alongside the nation's largest global health undergraduate training program gives us a unique means to build global health solutions that put people first.
Each year our center pushes forward one ground-breaking and important theme that we believe can reinvent and reimagine how we do global health.
Center Theme 2026-27: Consortium Science for Community-Centered Global Health
Global health’s most complex challenges cannot be solved by any single researcher, discipline, institution, or community. They require collaborations that bring together diverse knowledge, skills, resources, and lived experience. Yet building large research consortia that are genuinely participatory and community-centered remains a challenge.
Our 2026–27 theme asks how we can build global health consortia differently—and better. We will bring together social scientists, global health researchers, practitioners, and community partners to identify and test practical approaches for building collaborations that engage communities not simply as participants, but as partners in defining priorities, producing knowledge, and shaping action. Our goal is to develop new models and tools for consortium-based global health research that make community-centered and community-serving approaches easier to build, sustain, and scale.
Banner Image Credit: Map of health. Odra Noel. Source: Wellcome Collection. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)