With support from The Luke Charitable Foundation, Brown’s international medical exchange programs with Taiwan and China continue to grow—offering impactful experiences for students while building global connections in healthcare education.

On April 28, 2025, the Department of Neurosurgery, Brown Health, hosted a first-of-its-kind forum, inviting prominent neurosurgeons from Taiwan to visit Brown Health. The meeting laid the foundations for future exchanges and collaborations. The Forum was preceded by a dinner to welcome our guests and followed by tours of the Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University. The event concluded with a celebratory dinner.

Dr. Ramu Kharel has won the BMJ South Asia Award for his Nepal Poison Information Center pilot establishment project which is now operating 24/7. This center is the first of its kind in the country to improve healthcare outcomes and marks the beginning of a longer journey to scale and strengthen poisoning care throughout Nepal.

Daria Szkwarko, DO, MPH and co-PI Hussein Elias, MBChB, MMed, have been awarded a $6.5 million grant funded by Gates Foundation, Novartis, Eli Lilly and Company, and Merck through its Merck for Mothers initiative, with support from Panorama Global to support point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) education and care integration in western Kenya.

Brown Medical Student Awarded SAEMF Alli and Danielle Raja RAMS Medical Student Research Grant to Improve Healthcare Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Imagine a world where over 1 million children across 85 countries died from a single nutrient deficiency — deaths that could be prevented with a semi-annual vitamin supplement. Millions of lives saved can be attributed to the landmark US Agency for International Development (USAID)-supported trial of vitamin A supplementation in Indonesia (1978-1979), followed by replication trials, meta-analyses, World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines recommending regular high-dose vitamin A supplements and multilateral collaboration to provide vulnerable children with this nutrient (1,2).
Imagine a world without WHO child growth standards – standards that were developed from longitudinal data from children in the US, Brazil, Ghana, Oman, India and Norway, and now used in over 100 countries, including the US, to monitor child growth and identify malnutrition. Or a world where famine silently claims hundreds of thousands without warning, global data systems go blank, and nearly half of funding for emergency food aid vanishes.
This is a world without USAID and US membership in the WHO. Read More.

Adam C. Levine, MD, to lead Brown Center for Global Health Equity (CGHE). Adam C. Levine, MD, to lead Brown Center for Global Health Equity (CGHE) PROVIDENCE — In a letter to the Brown BioMed community, MUKESH K. JAIN, MD, Senior Vice President for Health Affairs and Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences, announced that the Academic Priorities Committee of Brown University has approved the Center for Global Health Equity (CGHE) within the Division of Biology and Medicine. The CGHE is the successor to the Global Health Initiative (GHI), which was founded in 2009. Associate Dean of Global Health Equity ADAM C. LEVINE, MD, MPH, FACEP, professor of emergency medicine and international and public affairs, will serve as CGHE’s founding director.

The center’s focus will expand to include clinical residents and fellows, undergraduate students, and students participating in the Brown Gateways program, Leadership Institute, Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, and other pathways programs and to BioMed faculty engaged in health equity research both locally and globally.

With the broader goal of directly engaging and benefiting communities both locally in Rhode Island and around the world, the CGHE aspires to conduct cutting-edge research that bridges gaps in global health knowledge and practice with a particular focus on technological innovation, implementation science, refugee health, and global health ethics.

Application Deadline: August 11, 2024
BRIGHT Pathway is a 2-year longitudinal program designed to create and support a multidisciplinary community of residents who are interested in making global health part of their career. BRIGHT Pathway consists of quarterly meetings with guest speakers, along with a self-directed curriculum of core global health topics.

The Brown Residency International Global Health Training Pathway (BRIGHT) is hosting a social for interested students. It will be a time to meet residents and faculty who share an interest in global health. They will discuss BRIGHT, applications, and their partnership with the GHI (Global Health Initiative). Please RSVP.

Dr. Adam Levine, Director of the Global Health Initiative, has been awarded a grant renewal for his NIH grant (NIH/ NIDDK 2R01DK116163).