HYC in the News

On Tuesday, April 20, 2021, Dr. Chris Woods, HYC Executive Director, presented his lecture "COVID-19 Research: Bringing us Together for Team Science in a Time of Social Distancing" as part of the Duke University School of Medicine COVID-19 Research Seminar Series.  You can listen to his talk and read more about other lectures in this series here: https://medschool.duke.edu/research/covid-19-research-seminar-series 

Congratulations to members of the Duke-Ruhuna Research Collaborative for winning the 2021 President's Award for Scientific Research, presented in Colombo, Sri Lanka on April 6. The paper, Evaluation of the WHO 2009 classification for diagnosis of acute dengue in a large cohort of adults and children in Sri Lanka during a dengue-1 epidemic, which was published in 2018 in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, was honored as one of the top twenty research publications at the ceremony.  The article reviews and examines the WHO's 2009 revisions to the diagnostic criteria for dengue. Because dengue and other acute febrile illnesses often look similar, it is important for clinicians to quickly and accurately identify the cause of a patient’s illness. With early detection and treatment, severe dengue outcomes can be improved. The Collaborative’s work highlighted…

Drs. Chris Woods and Gayani Tillekeratne discuss the trials and tribulations of teaching during a pandemic in an article titled "Teaching Innovation Under Pressure: Three Months, Two Universities, One Pandemic." By Noah Pickus and Ben Anderson One Pandemic, Two Universities The arrival of Duke Kunshan University’s first class of undergraduate students in Kunshan, China, in August 2018 was the culmination of nearly a decade of work to develop a new model for international undergraduate education. One of us led the creation of the curriculum for Duke Kunshan (DKU) and hired the faculty who would bring it to life. And one of us, a Duke post-doc in global health, was part of the first cohort of twenty faculty who had come from around the world to prepare students to navigate a…

As we shared with many of you, Dr. Ralph Corey, a champion of Global Health education for post‐graduate medical trainees long before it acquired broad appeal, retired at the end of June this year. Since 1985, he was responsible for facilitating and supporting nearly 500 clinical elective residents on rotations in over 20 diverse global sites. Understanding the importance of bidirectional opportunities, he also hosted approximately 200 international trainees from 15 global partners at Duke. His visionary leadership led to the creation of the Global Health Pathway for Residents and Fellows (GHP). A unique program as compared with our peer institutions, the GHP accepts individuals from all sub‐specialties, provides extended protected time to conduct research overseas, and provides masters level training in Global Health through the Duke MSc‐GH. Graduates of…

By Dr. Peter Kussin The Duke Internal Medicine residency program welcomed Dr. Chris Mwaniki to our program in July 2020. Over the past four years, it has been my privilege to work with this exceptionally talented and passionate physician as part of my global health work at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) in Eldoret, Kenya. Chris’ rather mundane title, “medical officer in hematology and oncology”, vastly understates the importance of his role at MTRH, which serves a catchment area of 22 million people. He was the glue which held the hematology and oncology service together and consistently made great things happen for his patients. Available 24/7, he always had a solution to even the most daunting diagnostic and treatment dilemmas. His cheerful and amazingly positive attitude was a source…

In March 2020, I was deployed to assist in standing up a federal alternative care site for patients with COVID‐19 in the Javits Convention Center in New York City (NYC). As a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and fifth year Medicine‐Psychiatry resident at Duke, I felt morally obligated to respond to the call to provide clinical care to people and communities at the epicenter of our country’s crisis. Beyond that, as a Global Health Pathway (GHP) resident at the Duke Global Health Institute / Hubert‐Yeargan Center for Global Health, the call appealed to the connection that I see between local and global health disparities. During the greater than one month‐long deployment, our team cared for more than 1,000 people infected with COVID‐19. Indeed, those individuals…