UC wins $4M Gates grant to plan School of Global Health
Sacramento Business Journal
The University of California said Tuesday it got a $4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support planning for a potential systemwide UC School of Global Health.
The proposed school, which the university envisions as training new leaders to help tackle global health issues, would be UC’s first multicampus, systemwide school, the university said.
The San Francisco Business Times reported in mid-October that the Gates Foundation was rumored to be ready to make such a commitment to the Global Health School’s planning process.
Efforts to launch the new UC global health school are being led, at least initially, by experts at UC San Francisco, including former UCSF Medical School Dean and former campus chancellor Haile Debas, M.D., now executive director of UCSF Global Health Sciences, and Sir Richard Feachem, a professor of global health at UCSF and UC Berkeley.
Feachem was previously executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Officials said the two-year grant of nearly $3.99 million will fund final planning efforts for the proposed global health school, “which is expected to seek UC Regents’ approval in 2010 and officially enroll students in summer 2011.”
In the Dec. 2 statement, Debas said global health problems including issues such as migration, climate change and emerging pandemics “are, in California, local health problems that demand solutions” and that a UC school of global health would help the system provide a new framework to study and help solve them.
The proposed multicampus program would feature “five or more” global health centers linking participating campuses and an administrative center on one of the 10 UC campuses, officials said. Although UCSF appears to be well situated to nab the administrative role, that’s far from certain at this point.
The school would include UC faculty in areas such as health and biological sciences, social sciences, law, business and engineering. Other U.S. universities that are making significant investments in the global health niche include Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Emory, the University of Washington, Columbia, Brown and Montreal’s McGill University, among others.
Chris Rauber is a staff writer at the San Francisco Business Times.
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