Thomas Quinn, director of the Johns Hopkins
Center for
Global Health, has named Chris Beyrer, Robert Bollinger
Jr. and Nancy Glass as associate directors. The three will
serve as liaisons between the center and the schools of
Public Health, Medicine and Nursing, respectively.
The center was launched in May 2006 to facilitate and
focus the extensive expertise and resources of the Johns
Hopkins Institutions, together with global collaborators,
to address and ameliorate the world's most pressing health
issues. It is the first such center anywhere to combine the
strengths of top-ranked schools of medicine, nursing and
public health.
The associate directors will identify and prioritize
opportunities and trends in their respective disciplines,
enabling the center to operate on the forefront of global
health activities. They also will establish collaborations
with other entities, both within and outside the
university, in order to design research projects, implement
new prevention and treatment interventions, and seek
resources for new lifesaving programs.
"I am very excited to have the advice and expertise of
Drs. Beyrer, Bollinger and Glass to assist with the
center's overall mission," Quinn said. "Each has a unique
set of skills and knowledge that can help the center
implement research findings, educational opportunities and
health services on a larger scale to improve health
wherever disparities exist."
Beyrer is a professor of
epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health,
where he serves as director of both the Hopkins Fogarty
AIDS International Training and Research Program and the
Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights. He
is also a senior scientific liaison with the HIV Vaccine
Trials Network.
Beyrer's work centers on HIV preventive interventions,
including vaccine clinical trials and preparedness studies,
and the epidemiology of HIV. He said he hopes to integrate
the work of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights
with the work of the Center for Global Health.
Bollinger is a professor of
infectious
diseases in the Department of Medicine at the School of
Medicine, with a joint appointment in the
Department of International
Health at the Bloomberg School. He directs the Johns
Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education and is
the country director for the Hopkins Fogarty International
Programs in India and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Bollinger has more than 27 years of experience in
international public health, clinical research and
education in a broad range of global health priorities,
including HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy and
emerging infections. Over the past 14 years, he has
initiated and conducted a large collaborative Indo-U.S. HIV
research program in Pune, with the National AIDS Research
Institute/Indian Council of Medical Research and the BJ
Medical College. His ongoing public health research
includes additional collaborative projects in Uganda and
the DRC.
Glass, an associate professor at the
School of Nursing,
conducts community-based collaborative intervention
research in the area of health disparities and intimate
partner violence and is a clinician working with survivors
of intimate partner violence. She recently completed two
years of study through the Building Interdisciplinary
Research Careers in Women's Health Scholar Program, which
is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development at the National Institutes of Health.
Glass is the principal investigator of an NIH/National
Institute of Nursing Research study to evaluate a workplace
intervention to prevent and reduce the impact of intimate
partner violence on the health, safety and employment of
low-income women. She also is principal investigator of a
study to assess for risk and protective factors of repeat
victimization for women in same-sex relationships and
co-principal investigator of a study to evaluate the
effectiveness, including cost-effectiveness, of rent
assistance toward permanent housing for battered women.
Both projects are funded by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
The Center for Global Health helps to broker
collaboration among nearly two doz-en existing programs in
the three schools; together, those programs already operate
more than 400 projects around the world. The center also
seeks out and secures funding for new initiatives and
recruits faculty to address emerging global health issues.
In addition, it puts students out into the field to work
shoulder to shoulder with faculty mentors and train most
effectively to become the next generation of leaders in
global health.