EMERGE—Empowering Women for Leadership in Global Health—is a leadership development program for diverse Emory graduate students who self-identify as women and are working in any discipline of global health. This 12-month program integrates four components: a foundational three-day leadership development workshop, monthly leadership seminars, an eight-month team-based challenge project, and a final dissemination event with university leaders. EMERGE is designed to enhance fellows' confidence and proficiencies in leadership skills, managing teams, and working with mentors; to strengthen fellows’ professional networks with peers, mentors, and sponsors; to generate and disseminate evidence about the experiences of women health professionals in global health; to advance fellows' careers in global health; and ultimately, to affect institutional norms and policies within Emory and beyond in ways that support gender equality in women’s leadership across all disciplines and sectors of global health.
The Impact of Your Gift
Funds will support:
- competitive scholarships to enable selected fellows to devote protected time to the program
- competitive travel awards to enable selected fellows to present findings from EMERGE team projects at professional conferences
- competitive dissemination awards to support open-access publication of team-project findings
- competitive career awards to support fellows who seek to complete a professional internship during their graduate studies
- competitive training awards for EMERGE alumni to participate in advanced leadership training in their respective discipline of global health
- honoraria for experts who wish to provide advanced training to fellows on topics, such as professional branding and effective use of social media
The recruitment of our inaugural cohort of EMERGE fellows demonstrated high demand for the program--yielding 85 expressions of interest for a cohort of 12 fellows. The launch of our first three-day EMERGE leadership development workshop in August, 2022, also was a resounding success. After the workshop, participants rated each course module and corresponding instructor on a scale of 1 “not at all satisfied” to 10 “completely satisfied”. Average ratings for course modules (7.5-8.9) and instructors (8.2-9.1) were outstanding. In pre/post workshop assessments, fellows also reported increased confidence and proficiency in all leadership skills, such as recognizing personal biases, navigating change, negotiating interests, and managing professional conflicts. Dr. Dani Fallin, Dean of the Rollins School of Public Health, launched our EMERGE speaker series with a conversation on her professional path to become Dean.
One EMERGE fellow expressed her view of long-term success after participation in the program, as follows: “Being an empowered woman who is aware of the gaps in global health research and... attempts to pursue them...to help those...left behind...in other words, really understanding the problem…and allowing those affected by it to share and be in the process of learning how to solve it.”
