About Us
A Message From Our Director
Welcome to the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the UNC School of Medicine, on the campus of the nation’s first public university.
The Institute is an engine for global innovation and pan-university collaboration, with a long and storied history of advancing global health. We catalyze a virtuous cycle that promotes discovery, education and training, and creates new avenues for translating research into impact by advancing health policy and practice. Our mission is to harness the full resources of the university and its partners to solve global health problems, reduce the burden of disease, and cultivate the next generation of global health leaders. We engage in global health reciprocal innovation, meaning that our work improves the delivery of healthcare both abroad and close to home, generating mutual benefit from both sides.
Within our UNC campus community, the Institute is known as a platform for global research, as well as a gateway to global health education and training. If you are an early career investigator, you will benefit from decades of deep grant making experience and global regulatory management at the Institute, to support you from concept to closeout, and everything in between. If you are seeking research training, you will find a variety of continually funded fellowship programs, led by faculty committed to providing transformative experiences for your professional and personal growth. If you are a medical student or resident, you’ll find unique pathways to experiential learning through our Office of Global Health and Education. For many, these experiences are catalysts for long careers in global health.
Our story began in the late 1980s, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with infectious disease faculty working in Chapel Hill and at NIH research sites around the world. This work grew, and led to our flagship site in Malawi, UNC Project-Malawi. Today, we have academically diverse centers of excellence on three continents, focused on women’s health, reproductive and sexual health, hematology and oncology, and mental health, with expanded global practice and education in surgery, pathology, radiology, and anesthesiology.
Throughout our history, we have cultivated partnerships across campus and around the world. We collaborate with faculty and trainees from all health alliance schools and centers on campus, and enjoy mutually beneficial relationships with academic, governmental, and non-governmental organizations in 45+ countries globally. Through these partnerships, we have built local capacity for global health research, service, and training in every country where we work, including at home in North Carolina. We count a number of foreign nationals among our faculty based in counties that include Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Vietnam. We are passionately faculty driven, meaning our sustained, steady growth has come from dedicated and imaginative faculty members who drive innovation. Our achievements have been recognized at the highest levels of the U.S. and international governments, and our success is a critical contributor to the recognition of UNC as a “leading global university.”
Finally, our work demonstrates that our shared humanity and resolve to end the most dire global health challenges of our time. Without dedication to the communities we serve, and our partners around the world, our efforts would fail. Our Institute members and staff have a strong commitment to service, deeply woven into the fabric of all that we do.
