Global Health Case Competition 2012
Additional coverage:
"Northwestern chosen to compete in global health summit" - Northwestern Daily student newspaper coverage
"Interdisciplinary Team to Compete in Global Health Competition" - Northwestern News coverage
For more information, contact:
Daniel Young
Center for Global Health
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
645. N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 1058
Chicago, IL 60611
tel: +1 312 503 8829
fax: +1 312 503 8800
d-young@northwestern.edu
February 1, 2012
NU's Global Health Case Competiton Team (from left to right): Mitra Afshari, Christoper Miller, Melissa Latigo, Kaushik Seethapathy, Shantanu Jani
The Center for Global Health has some exciting news – NU is sending its first team to Emory University's Global Health Case competition. The multi-disciplinary team submitted its proposal and was recently informed that they were among 20 other institutions to be accepted this year. In March, the Northwestern team from the Feinberg School of Medicine, Kellogg School of Management, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, will travel to Atlanta to participate in the week-long competition. The 2012 team is being sponsored by FSM’s Center for Global Health, Weinberg’s Office of International Program Development, and FSM’s Vice Dean for Education.
The multi-disciplinary team of students who are competing in the 2012 case study competition are:
- Mitra Afshari – 4th year MD/MPH student at FSM
Mitra Afshari is a fourth year medical and Master's in Public Health student at the Feinberg School of Medicine with a Bachelor's in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. She has been working on multidisciplinary teams and competitions since her engineering days, primarily in the area of healthcare provision and biotechnologies. She has collaborated on projects with the Kellogg School of Management and traveled to Uganda for field work on the development of an infant HIV diagnostic tool. During her medical school years, Mitra has focused her energy on establishing awareness of local healthcare disparities through student-group work, and has traveled to rural Mexico and India to pursue clinical work. She hopes to continue to incorporate Global Health work into her future career as a Neurologist. - Shantanu Jani – MMM joint degree program, MBA from Kellogg and MEM from McCormick
Shantanu is a first year MMM student pursuing masters degrees in business administration at the Kellogg School of Management and engineering management at the McCormick School of Engineering, with a focus on healthcare management and design. His first foray into global health is through a winter quarter Kellogg course called Global Initiatives in Management, which is partnering up with Kellogg's Global Health Initiative to launch an infant HIV/AIDS diagnostic test in India. He will be one of 30 students traveling to India in March for field research. He plans to use the human-centered design approach of the MMM program to take a look at complex problems like global health through a unique lens in order to create real, actionable insights. - Melissa Latigo – 4th year MD/PhD student at FSM
Melissa Latigo will soon graduate from the dual-degree MD/PhD program and her doctoral work is focused on Health Services Research. She is originally from Uganda, grew up in Kenya, and has worked on various projects in sub-Saharan Africa. In Lusaka, Zambia she provided recommendations to improve adherence to antiretroviral therapy among children in an HIV community-based program. More recently, she has been working with Kellogg’s Global Health Initiative to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and feasibility of introducing infant HIV point-of-care test devices to health facilities in Uganda and Kenya. She plans to return to East Africa to play a role in encouraging local research initiatives to advance health facility infrastructure. - Christopher Miller – Psychology Major / Global Health Minor at Weinberg and member of GlobeMed
Chris Miller is a senior pre-medical student in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, majoring in psychology and double minoring in global health and anthropology. During the fall of his junior year, Chris studied medical practice and policy in Denmark, Sweden, and Estonia. More recently, he received the John and Martha Mabie Fellowship for Public Health Research for his project designed to evaluate the use of art as a health message delivery tool. Chris drafted an addendum to the Chicago Department of Public Health’s Healthy Chicago agenda, detailing ways in which the Chicago arts community and public health stakeholders can collaborate. Following graduation, Chris hopes to pursue a dual degree in medicine and public health. - Kaushik Seethapathy – MBA student at Kellogg
Kaush Seethapathy is a Class of 2012 student at the Kellogg School of Management majoring in Health Enterprise Management, Management & Strategy and Social Enterprise. Prior to Kellogg, he worked as management consultant at Deloitte, launched a national non-profit initiative in Canada and spent time in Kenya volunteering at a non-profit hospital and business development organization. Kaush graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor’s degree in Systems Design Engineering. After business school, he will be joining Oliver Wyman's Health & Life sciences practice where he hopes to focus on provider/health network strategy – with a longer term interest in healthcare innovation in emerging markets .
Participation in the competition is a tremendous opportunity for Northwestern to provide a unique educational experience on global health that would involve students from multiple disciplines and schools working collaboratively in a team on a national stage. This dovetails nicely with the direction of the new strategic plan, which makes global health a top priority at NU and cites existing projects that rely on “collaborative efforts (that) draw on our expertise across many disciplines: science, medicine, business, engineering, communications and the social sciences.
Furthermore, the benefits of case competitions to engage students in global health have recently been recognized in a commentary published by the Lancet, which cites the inherent value of “program-based educational experiences that encourage students to adopt macro-level perspectives.” (Ali et al. 2011) The authors state that “the model of case competitions complements traditional, structured, and specialized higher education. Student teams optimize their combined inventories of diverse, but synergistic, skills and experiences, thus making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.” (Ali et al. 2011)
Emory's Global Health Case Competition Summary
For the past three years, Emory University’s Global Health Institute has held a Global Health Case Competition, which allows twenty multi-disciplinary teams from universities across the US to compete and design solutions in response to a global health dilemma based on real-world problems. Team members must be from at least three distinct disciplines and both graduate and undergraduate students are welcome. Last year’s case competition presented teams with a study on a fictional scenario, under which the new Director of East Africa’s Programming Office for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) faced significant budget cuts as well as a growing refugee crisis caused by civil disorder near the borders of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Teams were charged with designing a feasible and sustainable program response and policy recommendations within the proposed budgetary constraints with winning proposals coming from Emory, Dartmouth, UCSF, and Rice. Team members represented programs as diverse as Business, Engineering, Law, Medicine, Nursing, Public Health, and Theology.
This page last updated Oct 5, 2012