Director's Letter
Professor Frank Cobelens
On behalf of the Executive Board
2022 was a year of re-energising AIGHD's operations, building stronger partnerships, brainstorming novel ways to organise workshops, conferences, and symposia, and reconnecting with the people that we serve.
The end of COVID-19 restrictions allowed us to finally implement our AIGHD Fellows program, broadening the base of researchers in the two Amsterdam universities (UvA & VU) who engage in interdisciplinary collaborations on global health and human development. These include researchers in anthropology, artificial intelligence, dermatology, development and health economics, law, medical biology, medicine, microbiology, pediatrics, public health, and surgery.
For AIGHD, 2022 was a year marked by engagement, expansion, and new directions
By the end of 2022, we now have 38 leaders in their fields (Senior Fellows), 23 active midcareer researchers (Research Fellows), and 60 PhD students (PhD Fellows), as well as five (5) health professionals in allied institutions (Associate Fellows).
Organized discourses to create and deepen thematic innovation were (re)ignited in diverse fields, such as planetary health, healthy childhood development, mental health, antimicrobial resistance, artificial intelligence in global health, and immunization. We started an educational program to provide PhD students in global health with broad knowledge of the field and career guidance regarding science and policy impact. For 2023, we plan to strengthen the engagement of our fellows, start a mentoring program for Research and PhD Fellows and further broaden our fellows base in terms of scientific disciplines and health and development themes.
Ongoing Projects for 2022
In 2022, AIGHD had 39 projects ongoing
Several of these had high-profile outputs on diverse topics of global relevance, including access to medicines, (COVID-19) vaccines and diagnostics, universal health coverage and health insurance, digital health, voluntary medical male circumcision, differentiated HIV service delivery, tuberculosis vaccine development, community engagement for malaria eradication, SARS-CoV-2 infection in relation to HIV, and new approaches to detection and measurement of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
2022 was also the year in which AIGHD restarted its onsite symposia and conferences
It organized the 16th INTEREST Conference on HIV in Kampala, Uganda, with over 500 attendants from all over the African Continent and held the second face-to-face Eastern Europe - Central Asia (EECA) INTERACT Symposium on HIV, tuberculosis and viral hepatitis in Riga, Latvia. The 2022 edition of the Joep Lange Chairs and Fellows Symposium held in Amsterdam focused on the health of refugees and migrants.
Accelerating theory into practice
AIGHD Fellows actively contributed to national, regional, and global policy development in migrant health, antimicrobial resistance, vaccine development, control of COVID-19, HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis amongst others. At an institutional level, AIGHD also contributed to the development of the Dutch Global Health Strategy and of European Union global health policies through its active role in the European Global Health Research Institutes Networks (EGHRIN) of which it hosts the Secretariat.
Preparing for a Change in Governance
Finally, 2022 was a year of preparing for a major change of governance. Planned for early 2023, this is meant to facilitate and guide AIGHD's growth, improving its efficiency while guaranteeing the input from an expanding number of affiliated researchers and participating faculties and schools of the two Amsterdam universities. With additional investments we did in 2022 supporting the development and acquisition of new collaborative research projects and research funding, we expect that 2023 will be the year in which the 2022 boom of new activities and engagements will culminate in new projects, more scientific outputs, and policy impacts to stimulate equal opportunities for health and well-being for all.