The Latest News from VIGH

Severity of illness, history of stroke, and being divorced or widowed were independently predictive of delirium in hospitalized patients in Zambia, according to a study published in PLOS ONE.

The NIH-Fogarty supported UNZA-Vanderbilt Training Partnership for HIV-Nutrition-Metabolic Research (UVP) continues a multi-decade training collaboration between the University of Zambia School of Medicine/University Teaching Hospital (UNZA/UTH) and the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH).

"Mentors are teachers but not all teachers are mentors." Lackson Kasonka, Senior Mentor The next generation of global health researchers, scientists and practitioners are benefiting from a mentoring program at the University of Zambia (UNZA) in Lusaka with the help of colleagues from the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with support from the Fogarty International Center.

The America Society for Nutrition (ASN) recently selected VIGH Core Faculty Member, Doug Heimburger, M.D., M.S., to be a member of the ASN Class of 2019 Fellows. Being inducted as a fellow of the ASN is the highest honor of the society. Dr. Heimburger has been an active member of the ASN for many years, and he will attend the Nutrition 2019 meeting in Baltimore in June. Congratulations. 

Although mentoring is an important part of academic research, it is not common practice in many countries. In particular, many mentoring guidelines and strategies are tailored for high-income countries and lack appropriate approaches for mentoring in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). 

The Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded VIGH with a five-year, $4.66 million renewal grant to support the Vanderbilt-Emory-Cornell-Duke (VECD) Consortium for Global Health Fellows Program (vecd.org).

VIGH faculty and staff members won the 1st place blue ribbon for their poster, "Strengthening Global Health Medical Education through Multi-Modal Curriculum" at the 2017 Gerald S. Gotterer Health Professions Education Research Day (HPERD) on October 30.

In support of the Fogarty International Center, Dr. Doug Heimburger, VIGH Associate Director, co-authored a perspective piece published in this week’s edition of The New England Journal of Medicine. For 50 years, Fogarty has supported global health research conducted by U.S. and international scientists. By building relationships with international partners, they seek to advance science while training the next generation of scientists equipped to address global health needs.

Current and past fellows, and faculty of the UNZA-Vanderbilt Training Partnership for HIV-Nutrition Research (UVP). The program is supported by the Fogarty International Center.  

Every year since 2000, the VUMC Academic Enterprise has honored faculty members for Excellence in Teaching and Outstanding Contributions to Research. Recipients were nominated by their faculty colleagues and chosen by the 2016 VUMC Academic Enterprise Faculty Awards Selection Committees.This year both Douglas C. Heimburger, M.D., M.S. and D. Troy Moon, M.D., M.P.H.received the Jacek Hawiger Award for Teaching Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows in the Classroom, Lecture or Small Group Setting.

Workshop presenters and organizers

 

A Framework grant awarded to Drs. David W. Wright, Frederik Haselton and Douglas Heimburger at Vanderbilt University is enabling a dozen American and Zambian research trainees to develop and deploy novel solutions for this critical issue. A new inexpensive test would improve the likelihood of detecting infection and also reduce drug resistance in the parasite by treating only those who harbor it instead of blanket-treating anyone with a fever, which commonly occurs in malaria endemic countries. 

Doug Heimburger, M.D., M.S.