H2U: Global Health and Health Equity Research

Jose Debes (Program Director)
Projects: 

• Hepatitis B awareness and prognosis in Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania)
• Liver cancer epidemiology in Africa
• Liver cancer epidemiology in South America

Mahsa Abassi (Mentor)
Project: COVID prevalence study in BIPOC and marginalized populations in the Twin Cities.

David Boulware (Mentor)
Project: HIV and depression in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jonathan Kirsch (Mentor)
Project: Students will work on a mobile health initiative with Spanish speaking migrant farmworkers. An example of project activities may include collecting, distributing, sharing and monitoring views of popular education around covid vaccines for farmworkers. 

Cuong Pham (Mentor)
Project: Telemedicine in primary care for patients with opioid use disorder.

Hope Pogemiller (Mentor)
Project: Improving medical services for immigrant and refugee patients (working on informed consents in different languages, aiding in video-creation for translation examples, survey of interpreters).

Nasreen Quadri (Mentor)
Project: Contribute to the research on the history of faith-based services offered in hospitals in North America.

Radha Rajasingham (Mentor)
Projects: 

• Diagnostic tests and treatments in Ugandan people with AIDS
• Methods to prevent meningitis in people with HIV/AIDS
• Interventions to prevent AIDS-related infections

Joshua Rhein (Mentor)
Projects:

• Investigate immune responses to vaccination in Ugandans vs Americans receiving Yellow Fever vaccination
• Investigate chronic inflammation in well-controlled HIV in Mexico

William Stauffer (Mentor)
Projects:

• Studies on refugee Health and Tropical Medicine
• Studies looking at drug cost and health disparities, and studies on COVID prevention and mitigation in refugees via NRC RIM

Irina Stepanov (Mentor)
Project: Global cancer prevention research

These will be hour-long sessions on Zoom covering a variety of topics, including those targeting skills to help navigate college applications, financial literacy, and key topics in global health.

No, all students will participate in the program online. If it is deemed safe for students to visit campus in the coming year, transportation will be provided. Students will need to have internet access to participate in the program; if this is a challenge for an applicant, please indicate this in the application so we can find appropriate accommodations.

In your application you can indicate your preferred field of study (there will be options to select from). Most mentors are experts in infectious disease, global health and health equity and will have a few projects that you can contribute to.

The best type of student for this program is one who is curious, enjoys learning from experience, and is interested in human health and equity. Students should also have a strong interest in going on to college after high school.

How you engage with the program will depend on the kinds of skills you bring, and the kinds of skills you want to develop. Students will work with their mentors to decide what kinds of activities and learning are best suited for them in the program. For example, if you are especially interested in lab experiences, you may be paired with a mentor and a lab staff member who will help you learn how to analyze findings from test results obtained in the lab. Other examples of skills you may bring or develop could include performing a literature review, preparing visual graphics for publications, posters or manuscripts, creating videos about the research for a website, participating in a presentation about the project with the research team.

This program is particularly interested in working with students who are currently underrepresented in health science fields (medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, for example) to encourage them to consider future careers in health sciences. This includes students who are African-American and African, Native American, first generation American, and Latinx. Learn more about how the National Institutes of Health defines this.

We recommend that you only participate in this program if you have the time available to commit 3-5 hours per week working with your mentor and their staff. This program provides a small stipend to participants. For students who are part of the summer program, they will receive approximately $675 and students in the year-long program will receive $1,125.