Working in collaboration with faculty from UEM, the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) will work to build UEM’s institutional research capacity with support from the NIH Fogarty International Center (FIC). This new initiative, the UEM-Vanderbilt Academic Partnership for Enhancements in Research (APER), builds upon 14 years of collaboration towards research capacity building with a new focus on increasing faculty competitiveness through improved grant management as well as the establishment of a biostatistics core within the Faculty of Medicine.
Leading the project, Troy Moon, MD, MPH and Mohsin Sidat, MD, MSc, PhD will work closely with VIGH Senior Program Manager, Ann Green, MPH, utilizing the current VIGH infrastructure for grant management as a model to reinforce the UEM Offices of Project Support and Finance. In addition, Vanderbilt Research Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, Gustavo Amorim, PhD, will spearhead 1) the creation of advanced biostatistics courses that involve a sustainable co-teaching approach alongside UEM junior faculty to transition course leadership to UEM counterparts; and 2) provide mentorship towards the establishment of a biostatistics “core” to provide support to UEM investigators.
“The program is beginning to achieve a critical mass of investigators and will continue to train the next generation of Mozambican researchers,” said Troy Moon, MD, MPH, associate professor of Pediatrics at VUMC, who leads PRISM, APER, and directs several other HIV-related grants in Mozambique. Mohsin Sidat, MD, MSc, PhD, former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at University Eduardo Mondlane, co-directs the program and serves as director of the newly created UEM Implementation Science Unit.
FIC supports this project under agreement 1G11TW011529-0.
