ONLINE EVENT: Real Stories from the Front Lines: Research with Impact Sponsored by the Neglected Global Diseases Initiative (NGDI), UBC

Neglected Global Diseases (NGDs) are infectious diseases and other conditions that cause physical and cognitive impairments, contribute to mother and child illness and death, and make it difficult to earn a living, thereby disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest populations. This webinar will highlight how Canadian drug development can transform medical care for neglected diseases in humanitarian crises, by Dr. Jason Nickerson, Humanitarian Representative to Canada for Doctors Without Borders and in Rwanda by NGDI-UBC Co-Director and Associate Professor of Medicine Dr. Richard Lester. Each of these presentations will highlight the importance of working with partners in the countries where these diseases arise and to track and monitor the progress being done to address these diseases .

Dr. Richard Lester’s work focuses on researching digital health and virtual care for patient care in local and global health environments, focusing on mobile phone use (mHealth), equity, and access.

His mission is to ensure the scale-up of evidence-based digital health services and use rigorous, innovative data science approaches such as natural language processing (NLP) and other forms of AI for continuous quality improvement and to inform guidelines.

 

Dr. Jason Nickerson is the Humanitarian Representative to Canada for Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), a position that he has held following years of experience working in health and humanitarian agencies to develop, deliver, and influence health policy and programming globally and in Canada.

With experience in health service delivery as a respiratory therapist in critical care and anesthesia in four Canadian provinces and public health programming, policy development, and advocacy in multiple countries, Jason Nickerson brings a frontline perspective to developing and delivering high-level public health policy and operations. Throughout his career, he has built strategic engagement with senior decision-makers and worked with leading public health experts to develop innovative health programming that addresses needs in humanitarian emergencies and for complex public health challenges such as health system strengthening and reform, drug policy, access to medicines, and addressing the health needs of older adults, particularly in long-term and complex continuing care.

Stories from the Front Line: Universities and Global Citizenship

This series engages with the critical question of what role public universities should occupy in international sustainable development, particularly informed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by all Member States, including Canada, in 2015. As the UN explains, the SDGs “are an urgent call for action by all countries—developed and developing—in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth—all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.”

To better understand what is at stake with this question, conveners of this series will stage a series of conversations with people working on the front lines of university global engagement. The first three events of the series will be centred on personal stories and experiences generated from the work of three organizations with permanent, satellite, or temporary homes at UBC: the Neglected Global Diseases Initiative, the Scholars at Risk program, and Academics Without Borders. In the fourth and final event, panelists will revisit the larger question of the ethics and risks of university engagement in international partnerships and around a common cause, as well as discuss what it looks like to build capacity, what it means to develop a sense of global citizenship, as what they see as the current and future challenges and limitations of this kind of work.

Series Conveners: Nancy Gallini, Academics Without Borders; Natasha Nobell, Scholars at Risk UBC; Kishor M. Wasan, Neglected Global Diseases Initiative.