Thank You to Our Donors
The growth and innovation we’ve achieved over the last 20 years of the program could not have been accomplished without the tremendous support and collaboration of our esteemed donors. Here are some highlights of how donor support created opportunities for GHS to support our fantastic students and faculty.
Thanks to the generosity of the Watkins Family, our founding director Dr. William Leonard was honored with an endowed chair in November 2023, the Watkins Family Professor of Global Health, as an acknowledgement for Dr. Leonard’s distinguished career of cutting edge anthropological and global health research, innovative leadership, and program development.
Two students were awarded a Radulovacki Global Health Fellowship in 2023-2024:
- Blair Donohue was able to use the funds to support her participation in the 66th All India Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology to examine the current state of professional obstetric culture in India.
- Lyra Johnson received a fellowship to support her to present the results of her public health research on stigma experienced by caregivers of children with tuberculosis at the eighth annual South African Tuberculosis Conference in June 2024.
The Radulovacki Global Health Visiting Scholars fund enabled GHS to host esteemed global health scholar Seye Abimbola (MD, PhD) to Northwestern for the spring 2024 quarter. A health systems researcher from Nigeria, and currently faculty in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney (Australia), Dr. Abimbola taught a fantastic GHS course, “Decolonisation, Knowledge, and Global Health,” and offered a public lecture entitled “To Connect a System to More of Itself” on April 18th, giving students and faculty a taste of his forthcoming book, The Foreign Gaze: Essays on Global Health, being published by IRD Editions (open source) in fall of 2024. We were incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Abimbola, and for all that we learned from him!
Donor funds also enabled eight students to participate in GHS’s “Maternal Health in the 20th Century: Historical Research in London’s Wellcome Library” study abroad program, hosted and taught by Dr. Sarah Rodriguez in Fall 2023. In this annual program, students enter the Wellcome Library with historical questions, searching through archival documents to find primary sources related to their respective research questions. Upon return to Northwestern, these students complete an intensive historiography course where they learn how historians think about and write histories by combining primary and secondary sources. The course culminates in each student writing a high-quality research essay based on their original work.