RESEARCH in Global Health
We engage in global health research, advocacy and education across many lower-income and/or challenging settings around the world, including Ghana, Togo, Ethiopia, Brazil, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.
With each of these countries, our Research Fellows collaborate with numerous academic, health service, NGO and policy partners, covering primary survey research, secondary data analyses, and interventional studies.
We make sure that our approach is equitable, including greater transfer of power, skills and funding to our international partners. This has included greater proportion of funding on grants, equality in co-authorship, and having international colleagues leading the priority-setting and dissemination process, to promote greater trust in our research, and thus usefulness of our findings.
Topics of focus include the impact of climate change upon health, Neglected Tropical Diseases (such as scabies and leprosy), digital health, food insecurity and nutrition, and vaccine hesitancy. Our findings have been used and cited in Ghana policy documents and training manuals, and the team have published dozens of journal papers.
The research team are regularly invited to present at high-level events run by the UN agencies, and are active members of core working groups at the World Health Organisation and the Commonwealth Secretariat.
There is also extensive public communication, via The Conversation and mainstream media. The CIRU team supervise undergraduate and postgraduate students on global health topics. Additionally, Dr Michael Head has Visiting positions at the University of Health and Allied Sciences, and University for Development Studies, both in Ghana.
RESIN
The Research Investments in Global Health study, RESIN, is an analysis of global funding trends for health research. This project, co-created over a decade ago by CIRU’s Dr Michael Head, analyses the investments awarded from public and philanthropic funders. RESIN is a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaborative team who utilise funding data from over 1000 national and international funders. The project has previously received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK NIHR, and the WHO. Their results, which include global analyses of infectious disease and cancer research funding, have been cited by high-level global health stakeholders such as the WHO and UNICEF, and they have several high-profile written outputs, including original research articles in Lancet and Nature journals. Learn more here.