Director's letter
The Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD) experienced a transformative 2024, marked by significant changes and milestones. The year marked 15 years since our founding, celebrating a decade and a half of innovative and inclusive scientific research, as well as shaping global health policies.
In alignment with our founding principles of equal opportunities for health for all, while reinforcing our founder Dr Joep Lange's vision of science as activism in this special year, we embraced “Towards a Just Future in Global Health” as our guiding vision for 2024.
This theme reflected our commitment to adapting to shifting global health priorities while staying true to our core values. To honour this vision, we hosted a special edition of the Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Symposium, which underscored the importance of our past achievements while emphasizing our forward-looking agenda.
The global health sector underwent significant shifts in 2024. HIV/Aids funding declined, as broader planetary health themes took precedence. Anticipating these developments, AIGHD took its first major step into climate and health research through the SPRINGS Project, which examines the impact of climate change on diarrheal disease across Romania, Ghana, Italy, and Tanzania.
We have begun implementing our multi-annual strategy, designed to both respond to evolving global health priorities and further our vision of equal health opportunities for all. A key aspect of this strategy involved strengthening formal partnerships with institutions such as the College of Medicine and the Infectious Diseases Institute at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda.
The Amsterdam University Medical Center's Department of Global Health is one of the founders of our organization. In 2024, we worked with the Amsterdam UMC to streamline our operations and reduce operational costs, thus ensuring a sustainable future for AIGHD.
Nurturing our Fellows
In 2024, our Fellows cohort expanded, with a strong focus on supporting early-career researchers and preparing the next generation of global health leaders. We had a total of 160 Fellows, of whom 40 lead their field (Senior Fellows), 39 who are midcareer (Research Fellows), 71 who are pursuing a PhD (PhD Fellows), and 9 based in allied institutions (Associate Fellows). In 2024, we organized our annual Fellows’ Fair as well as a Fellows event under the theme Causality. We continuously supported our Fellows with grant acquisition and project management.
Total Fellows Cohort
Senior Fellows
Associate Fellows
Research Fellows
PhD Fellows
Education and research
AIGHD’s commitment to education and research continued in 2024. Our research programmes, carried out together with our partner educational and research institutions globally, cover a wide array of disciplines. From clinical medicine, basic sciences, and epidemiology to economics, law, and behavioural sciences, cross-disciplinarity remains at the core of our research and education. In 2024, these research activities resulted in 7 PhD defenses.
We introduced the "Figure It Out" course to the EDCTP-funded East African Consortium for Clinical Research (EACCR), which taught participants about various quantitative research methodologies. We continued our “Global Health in Context: Sri Lanka” bachelor course in partnership with the University of Ruhuna and continued leading the quantitative courses of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Research Master's in Global Health programme, organized by the Athena Institute. We also continue to provide contributions to the bachelor’s and master’s programmes of the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Advocacy and global health engagement
AIGHD remained involved in advocacy and policy initiatives throughout 2024, playing a leading role in key global health networks. We retain active membership in the Dutch Global Health Hub; AIGHD co-organized a Global Health Hub meeting on the Dutch implementation of the outcomes of the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance. In addition, we remain active members of and host the secretariat for the European Global Health Research Institutes Network (EGHRIN).
The 18th International Conference on HIV Treatment, Pathogenesis, and Prevention Research (INTEREST), organized by AIGHD with Virology Education, took place in Cotonou, Benin, and attracted over 800 delegates and more than 1,200 abstracts from all over the African continent. Later in the year, we hosted the Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Symposium and Masterclass under the theme "Towards a Just Future in Global Health" with attendees from all over the world.
Changes in leadership
In 2024, AIGHD underwent key leadership transitions. Our former Executive Director, Prof. Anna Vassall, joined the World Health Organization, while our former Director for Operations, Diana Numan, also departed from the organization.
As of November 2024, the Executive Board consists of Prof. Constance Schultsz, Dick Ernste, and Rob van der Kolk who are leading the implementation of AIGHD’s multi-annual strategy. As we move forward, we remain committed to advancing global health equity through research, education, and advocacy, ensuring our work continues to reflect the values and vision that have defined AIGHD for the past 15 years.