The Center for the Study of Human Health assembles eminent faculty, researchers, and thought leaders from across disciplines, departments, schools, and institutions to meet challenges facing human health. Our educational programs, such as the Emory Co-Design Lab for Health Equity, offer students a pioneering education in the science of health as it is embodied in the human experience and aim to inspire students to become leaders for the next generation.
The Mission of the Emory Co-Design Lab for Health Equity is to promote health equity through the co-design of health and social innovation programs with marginalized populations by harnessing low-cost, cutting-edge technologies. We bring together community members from low-resourced countries with Emory students and faculty to create community-led solutions to global health problems.
The Gavegnano Drug Discovery Program is directed by Dr. Christina Gavegnano, who has a portfolio of bench-to-bedside success in FDA and globally approved life-saving medications and late-stage human trials. Her portfolio includes successfully treatment of acute COVID-19, HIV-1 cure, cutting edge research on Long-COVID, and neurological diseases and traumatic brain injuries. The mission of our program is to help students flourish through meaningful experiential learning in a bench-to-bedside educational opportunity in an environment that is meeting immediate health needs as they happen globally. This is a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to interface and train directly with high-level, cutting-edge research and discovery that saves lives globally.
We are fundraising for undergraduate innovation projects addressing the vision of “Health is Everything—personal, social and global.” Human Health undergraduate students generate inspired and entrepreneurial projects, ranging from epidemiologic investigations to narrative and film-based projects profiling the human experience of health. We are fund- raising to support project ideation, development and execution, as well as internship experiences. Student scholarships are needed for project materials, conference attendance, project presentation costs, transportation to project sites, and to support community projects and study abroad. We're also fundraising for new hardware to help us continue innovating with communities; in particular, our Emory students are currently working on a holographic microscope to detect E.coli in water sources in rural Guatemala. We are working with a partner lab in Guatemala, and a little bit of funding would go a very long way in supporting our student teams in their work.
Funding will be used for student laboratory materials to support their work, stipends and scholarships to permit any interested student in participating, irrespective of means, and funds to support attendance at conferences to present their work. In addition, scholarships support students in their applications for post-graduate training.
Each year we have student-generated projects that address innovative approaches to health issues ranging from device innovation to food distribution programs and film narratives on health experiences for public-facing education and mental health/well-being challenges among young people. Our graduates have gone on to work for and with journalists, film-makers, public and private health organizations, as well as policy and legal groups focused on human health.
In the Co-Design Lab for Health Equity, about 20 Emory students are employed each academic year. They join the lab because they believe everyone should have access to high quality health care, and they want to be a part of creating solutions toward that goal. Our students go on to volunteer internationally and to careers in global health and medicine.
For the past two years 25 students have annually experienced these opportunities, with students participating in multiple patents, international meeting attendance, publications and admission to top graduate and medical training programs. The program changes the lives of students, who in turn participate in changing the lives of countless others through life-saving drug discovery and distribution.
