For the past four years, UTMB’s annual Global Health Education Symposium has helped students who travel to different countries showcase the work they’ve done while in those host nations and enabled the university to forge partnerships with collaborators throughout the world.
This year’s event, held Oct. 10 at Levin Hall, was the most well attended to date with more than 150 on hand to participate in workshops, hear a keynote address on ways to engage effectively in global health challenges and view posters produced by medical students who worked on global health projects in other countries.
Dr. Matt Dacso, director of UTMB’s Center for Global Health Education and associate professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine, said the symposium’s focus has always been on ways to improve the international experience for both students and host countries.
“I was amazed at how many students traveled to another country but there was nothing to communicate what that student did while they were there, no institutional memory of what the student had worked on,” said Dacso. “Our students work hard and they make personal and financial sacrifices to do their work. The symposium was initially a way for them to showcase the work they’ve done and invite the campus to see that there’s a global health program at UTMB where students play a meaningful and vital role.”
Since that initial symposium in 2011, the event has grown to place more of an emphasis on inviting partners from host countries to attend as well as focusing on mentoring trainees who travel to work in other nations. This year’s event added workshops with topics that included, “Emerging Epidemics” and “Implementation of Change in Global Health.”
This year’s symposium was sponsored by the Center for Tropical Diseases and the Institute for Collaboration in Health. Dr. Andres G. “Willy” Lescano, an infectious disease epidemiologist, associate professor at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru and a UTMB adjunct professor, focused his keynote speech on reflections on global health and its evolution, suggestions for effective careers and opportunities for the future in global health.
Lescano said one of the keys to improving global health initiatives going forward is to encourage more sharing of knowledge and resources unilaterally between the countries that host missions and the nations sending those on their missions.
“Global health is not devoid of criticisms and it faces many challenges,” said Lescano. “One of the big ones from the point of view of our host countries is that sometimes there is a lack of bidirectionality or reciprocity between the numbers of people coming to the host country and those going from the host country to the one sending them to us on medical missions.”
Lescano added that the growth in global health initiatives has led to a greater diversity of fields of application and a wide variety 
of programs, opportunities and support for missions worldwide and that now nearly 30 percent of UTMB students go abroad to work.
“Be thankful for that because those opportunities didn’t used to be there,” said Lescano. “It is a privilege to join such research in these host countries, and if you’re aware of that, it will help you take better advantage of your mission.”
Dacso said the expectations for global health—along with the symposium itself—has changed and will continue to evolve.
“The centrality of everything we do is relationships,” he said. “The prevailing ethos of global health today is not just equity, but value add. If these host countries are taking our students, we’ve got to be doing something that’s at least beneficial for them. The era of U.S. institutions just sending students but there not being anything provided in return is over. There’s such a wide variety in the types of experiences students can have, whether that’s clinical or lab-based in communities but what you want to avoid is global health tourism. We work hard to ensure that students are giving as much as they get through this experience.”
POSTER WINNERS
Best Basic/Clinical Science Poster and Best Overall Poster
Kato Katz versus Lumbreras rapid sedimentation test to evaluate helminth prevalence in the setting of a school-based deworming program
Miguel Cabada, Roberto Pineda, Monisha Konana, Paige Hoyer
UTMB
Best Community-based Projects Poster
Evaluation of a visual-aid toolkit for water, sanitation and hygiene education in the bateyes of La Romana, Dominican Republic
Jennifer Nordhauser, Christopher Smith, Eden Bernstein, Claire Jordan, Damilola Jibowu, Colton Rice, Lauren Michael, Johanna Ascher, Paunel Bropleh, Ruth Berggren, Jason Rosenfeld
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Best Topical Poster
A comparison between the incidence of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome among adolescent females in rural versus urban populations and their respective risk factors
Janika Prajapati
UTMB