Director's letter
The Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD) is the foremost cross-disciplinary research and educational centre for global health in the Netherlands. In 2025, we continued building on our international reputation for excellence.
AIGHD delivers a wide-ranging research programme in global health, attracting prestigious and substantial funding from the European community, pharmaceutical companies, and non-governmental organisations. A significant achievement this year was receiving four new grants from the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) for projects starting in 2026.
Areas of high standing include research on infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV, with particular attention to the growing challenges of antimicrobial resistance, diagnostics, health financing, climate change, and infant and childhood illnesses. In 2025, we added a cross-disciplinary research programme on Artificial Intelligence in Global Health.
Nurturing our fellows
We consolidated our fellows cohort in 2025 and focused strongly on supporting early-career researchers to help prepare the next generation of global health leaders. We counted 155 fellows by the end of the year, of whom 41 lead their field (senior fellows), 40 are mid-career scientists (research fellows), 65 are pursuing doctoral studies (PhD fellows), and 9 are based in allied institutions (associate fellows).
AIGHD hosted the annual Fellows' Fair and another fellows' event under the theme of antimicrobial resistance, together with researchers of the Infectious Disease Institute at Makerere University in Uganda. We support our fellows with grant acquisition and project management, which resulted in the successful acquisition of the four EDCTP3 grants mentioned, among other funding.
Total fellows cohort
Senior fellows
Research fellows
Associate fellows
PhD fellows
Education and research
AIGHD's commitment to education and research continued in 2025. Our research programmes, carried out in collaboration with our partner educational and research institutions globally, span a wide array of disciplines.
We again hosted our "Global Health in Context: Sri Lanka" bachelor course in partnership with the University of Ruhuna and once more led the quantitative courses of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's research master's in global health, organised by the Athena Institute. We also contributed to various bachelor's and master's degree programmes of Amsterdam's universities.
In 2025, research activities resulted in 10 PhD defences, with Pramiti Parwani from the law faculty graduating with honours.
Advocacy and global health engagement
AIGHD has partnerships across the globe, including a regional office located in Uganda. We remained actively involved in advocacy and policy initiatives throughout 2025, playing a leading role in key global health networks.
We retained active membership of the Dutch Global Health Hub and the European Global Health Research Institutes Network (EGHRIN). In 2025, it was decided to move EGHRIN's secretariat – which AIGHD used to host – to the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
Our fellows continued to contribute their expertise by advising the European Commission, World Health Organization, and funders such as the Gates Foundation, among other eminent organisations.
The 19th annual INTEREST conference, organised by AIGHD with Virology Education, took place in Windhoek, Namibia. It attracted 572 delegates from 36 countries and more than 1,000 abstracts from all over the African continent.
Reclaiming global health progress
The global health sector underwent significant shifts in 2025. Funding reduced dramatically, further accelerating the ongoing decline in HIV funding. This year's edition of the Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Symposium therefore explored how the global health field might reclaim and reimagine progress when many hard-won gains risk being lost.
Despite the funding declines, AIGHD obtained several research grants in 2025. These successes include applications resulting from the strengthening of our formal partnership with the College of Medicine and the Infectious Diseases Institute at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, agreed in 2024.