October 8, 2015

USC Funded by NIH/Fogarty: GEOHealth Hub for Research and Training in eastern Africa

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USC Environmental Health

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Worku Tefera (right), Steve Howland, and Suresh Ratnam pictured on the roof of the Soto Street building at USC HSC disassembling an air pollution monitor.

October 8, 2015: NIH Fogarty International Center announced they are investing $21 million in partnerships between research institutions in the US and Canada to establish Global Environmental and Occupational Health (GEOHealth) Hubs in developing countries.

Through the leadership of Dr. Kiros Berhane, Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine and Dr. Jon Samet, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine in the Keck School of Medicine, USC will be partnering with Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) for the eastern Africa portion of the work which will include air pollution monitoring work in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. The air pollution monitoring network and surrounding work that is a part of this hub is modeled after the longitudinal Southern California Children's Health study of which Dr. Berhane has been an investigator. The hub will have two main components dealing with training and research activities to be led by USC and Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) respectively. The research projects will be conducted primarily by Eastern African researchers.

Media coverage:
USC Press Release here.
NIH/Fogarty PRESS RELEASE and related resources and information about the GEOHealth Hub project can be found here.

For background on this project at USC,see this blog post detailing part of the air pollution monitoring network planning process that took place back in April 2014 when Worku Tefera, researcher from Ethiopia visited USC.