20 Jul Call for Abstracts is OPEN

Call for Abstracts

Interdisciplinary Masterclass in Global Health and Development:

‘Migration and Health’

Exact Dates to be Confirmed

Led by the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development and the Joep Lange Institute

Are you a PhD candidate or a Postdoctoral fellow wanting to share your insights at a Masterclass led by world-renowned global health researchers and thought leaders?

We invite you to submit your abstract for an interdisciplinary Masterclass in Global Health on Migration and Health 2022 as part of the Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Program. The Masterclass will consist of two online sessions.

Three annual Masterclasses were previously held in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Each Masterclass has a theme, with the first being ‘Access to Care: Making Health Markets Work for the Poor,’ the second being ‘Societal Preparedness for Epidemics’ and the last year’s ‘The Future of Vaccination.’ The Masterclass theme for the year 2022 is ‘Migration and Health.’

With millions of people constantly on the move around the globe, whether due to war, famine, or simply in search of a better life, migration has become everyone’s reality. Migration impacts many aspects of life, shapes world events, and prompts political debates. One element of migration that is less often discussed is its relation to health. Migration and health encompass a variety of topics from non-communicable and communicable diseases to mental and psychological health, affecting host populations, the population of origin, and future generations.

Late-stage PhD students and early postdoctoral researchers are encouraged to individually submit abstracts of their research that addresses the above topics, related to migration and health. The abstract review team will use academic excellence and relevance of the research for the theme as the main criteria. It will, furthermore, consider the diversity within the classes (subject, discipline, gender, geography, etc.) and the applicants’ motivation.

Led by Prof. Anna Vassall, Prof. Charles Agyemang, Prof. Melissa Parker, and Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, two online masterclasses will be held with two masters facilitating each class. Each class will have a maximum of 8 participants who will be offered the opportunity to present and discuss their research. This is an opportunity to share your research, explore innovative ideas, and learn from other researchers in different fields of Global Health and Development, in an interdisciplinary research setting.

The abstracts will be published on the program website. To review past masterclasses and learn more about previously accepted research, please visit jlc.aighd.org.

Please submit your abstract via the following link no later than 23 September 2022:

https://www.eventure-online.com/eventure/testLogin.form?Af8fde888-be18-4c7b-a307-43fd4f6c93bc

How to submit your abstract:

Please make sure to include the following sections in your abstract:

• Name of author(s)
• Title
• Background
• Methods
• Results
• Conclusion
• Motivation

Below you find the guiding criteria for the abstract submission:

• To submit your abstract, go to the following website and submit through the form here:

https://www.eventure-online.com/eventure/testLogin.form?Af8fde888-be18-4c7b-a307-43fd4f6c93bc

• Please include a short biography and a photograph of yourself along with the submission.
• Each entry should have a maximum of 250 words.
• Check your email for confirmation of the submission and contact the organizers by the contact information presented below if you have not received a confirmation email once you have submitted your abstract. Please also check your spam box.

Contact information

If you encounter any challenges with submission, you can contact AIGHD’s Diede Smith at d.smith@aighd.org

About the Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Program

The Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Program was established in 2015 in memory of prolific HIV activist, medical doctor, and scientist Prof. Joep Lange. Funded in part by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the program was commissioned by the Joep Lange Institute and is based at the Department of Global Health-Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD) at the Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam. The current chairholders are Prof. Dan Ariely, Prof. Mark Dybul, Prof Anna Vassall, and Prof. Catherine Kyobutungi.

About AIGHD

The Amsterdam Institute for Global Health & Development (AIGHD) is a research and education institute with a mission to address challenges in global health and development by conducting collaborative interdisciplinary research, generating insights and solutions, and educating the next generation of global health leaders.

AIGHD conducts collaborative, interdisciplinary research prioritizing infectious disease elimination, antimicrobial drug resistance, chronic care & ageing, urbanization & health, health markets, and economics of human development. It aims to educate and inspire the next generation of global health leaders at undergraduate, post-graduate and professional levels to shape a healthier and more prosperous future for all. AIGHD aspires to accelerate progress on global health objectives by sharing knowledge and insights with global agencies, governments, NGOs, and the scientific community.

About JLI

The Joep Lange Institute is an activist Global Health & Development Institute, inspired by the life and work of Dr. Joep Lange. JLI combines science, activism, and pragmatism to reach its goal: making health markets work for the poor in countries where the system fails the people. To achieve this goal JLI analyzes the obstacles and failures in healthcare today, asking inconvenient questions when necessary. The JLI comes up with concrete solutions for healthcare quality, delivery and finance. JLI develops and tests these on the ground, and advocates to scale those that have real impact for real people.

Masters’ Bios

Professor Anna Vassall

Prof. Anna Vassall is a health economist with over twenty-five years of experience in economic analysis and research in low- and middle-income countries. She has extensive experience supporting national health planning and priority setting, aid effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness analysis in a wide range of low- and middle-income countries. Prof. Vassall has directed and provided economic support to European Community and World Bank funded health sector reform and development projects in Yemen, East Timor, Syria and Sudan: supporting the development of health benefit package, national strategic plans and medium term expenditure frameworks.

Currently, Prof. Vassall is the Director of the Centre for Health Economics in London (CHiL) and sits in the Department of Global Health at LSHTM. She has led a wide range of influential economic analyses on HIV prevention for key populations (Avahan programme), the integration and organisation of HIV care and treatment services (Integra project), and new diagnostics for TB (Xpert MTB/RIF) and the prevention of violence against women and girls (What Works). She has an interest in methods to incorporate health systems and other constraints and a societal/equity focused perspective into economic evaluation and priority setting. She is the module organiser for LSHTM’s distance learning course in economic evaluation.

Prof. Vassall is a founding member of the TB-MAC modelling consortium and sit on the technical advisory group for health technology assessment at WHO. She sits on the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for the WHO’s Global TB Programme (STAG-TB) and Task Force on Catastrophic Cost Measurement for TB, and on the Lancet Commission for TB. She was a lead investigator of the Global Health Costing Consortium; a Bill and Melinda Gates funded project to estimate and analyse HIV, TB and other health service costs globally. Currently, she is supporting several countries in developing health benefit packages as part of the Disease Control Priorities (DCP) project. Prof. Anna Vassall was awarded the Joep Lange Chair at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health, University of Amsterdam in 2018.

Professor Charles Agyemang

Prof. Charles Agyemang’s research is focused on ethnic inequalities in health with a major focus on cardiovascular diseases; and NCDs in low- and middle-income countries. In particular, he focuses on gaining insights into how migration and the contexts in which migrants and ethnic minority groups live and work shape their health, with the ultimate aim of translating his research findings to targeted intervention programs and clinical practices that are most appropriate for these populations. Lately, he has focused his attention on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities in places like the UK, the US, and the Netherlands.

He is a Professor of Global Migration, Ethnicity and Health, and Principal Investigator at Amsterdam University Medical Centres, University of Amsterdam (AMC-UvA). He is also currently the Vice President of the Migrant Health section of the European Public health Association; Scientific Chair of the Global Society of Migration, Ethnicity, Race & Health; and a fellow of the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) under the Consolidation Award program. He is the PI of the RODAM study (www.rod-am.EU) and has published extensively and edited several books. He is a member of the WHO task force on NCDs in Migrants and was also a member and a rapporteur of the Planning Committee for WHO Global Consultation on Migrant Health. He is a member of the Lancet Racial Equality Advisory Board and the European Hypertension Society Workgroup on Hypertension & Cardiovascular Risk in Low Resource Settings. Prof. Agyemang serves as a member of several scientific advisory boards.

Professor Melissa Parker

Prof. Melissa Parker is a member of the Department of Global Health and Development. Her research builds on a multi-disciplinary training in Human Sciences and a DPhil (which combined methods and approaches current in social and biological anthropology) from Oxford University. Research questions typically emerge from extensive periods of ethnographic fieldwork and engage with global health policies and practice. Topics investigated include epidemic preparedness and response, mental health and healing in war zones, social and political legacies of mass forced displacement, and biosocial approaches to the control of neglected tropical diseases in Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.

In 2014, she established the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform with colleagues from Sierra Leone and the UK. This proved a useful model for enabling expertise across the social sciences to useful inform the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and the Platform now engages with a broader range of issues through the Social Sciences in Humanitarian Action Platform. In 2020 and 2021, Prof. Parker contributed to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours and the ethnicity subgroup of SAGE.

Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi

Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi is the Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC). She was formerly the Center’s Director of Research and has served APHRC in several leadership roles over the past 15 years, having joined as a post-doctoral fellow in 2006.

She holds a Ph.D. in Epidemiology and a Master of Science in Community Health and Health Management from the University of Heidelberg. Prior to her graduate studies, Catherine studied medicine at Makerere University, Kampala, after which she worked as a medical officer in Western Uganda for three years.

In 2018, Catherine was elected as a Fellow of the  African Academy of Sciences and in 2019, she was selected  as a Joep Lange Chair at the University of Amsterdam; a position in which she investigates chronic disease management in African countries. She is the co-director of the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA), a program that seeks to build and strengthen the capacity of African research leaders and has trained more than 230 PhD fellows in eight African universities.