Big Question: Center for Global Health Workshop

Principal Investigator: Olufunmilayo Olopade, Medicine, Human Genetics

Funding Type: Workshop

Focus Area: Complexity

Big Idea: The Center for Global Health (CGH) supports and develops new interdisciplinary relationships and collaborations that address complex challenges to human well-being, such as those identified in the UN Declaration on Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) and the IHME Global Burden of Disease (GBD). We have identified several areas of specialty (health, environment, governance and economics, and big data science) that are highly interdisciplinary and will enhance collaboration across departments, paving way for the establishment of a University-wide Institute for Global Health. An exciting area of research is the development of an international network of researchers to advance “Big Data Science” in partnership with the Computation Institute and Argonne National Laboratory. In health research, using cloud computing, genome and epigenome sequences can be analyzed to personalize cancer care, a process that can be easily applied to other diseases, such as diabetes, cardiopulmonary diseases, and obesity. Big Data Science can be used to monitor infectious disease outbreaks and to develop a robust interdisciplinary program in metabolism that integrates microbiome, immunology, and metabolomics. The possibility exists to conduct research that informs policy in all four proposed interdisciplinary research areas to implement programs that disseminate recent scientific advances to improve global health and attract funders.