The Sparkman Center recently sponsored five students to attend the 7th Annual Universities Fighting World Hunger Summit (UFWH) in Honduras. UFWH started in 2004 as a partnership between the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and Auburn University.

Today's global health challenges require the engagement and commitment of people and organizations specializing in numerous fields and disciplines. The perspectives and recommendations from the worlds of business, medicine, public health, nursing, theology, law, the liberal arts, and science are essential to improving health and health care around the world. It is for this reason that UAB is calling for students from multiple disciplines to address a global health challenge in a team setting.

SIFAT, a local partner of the Sparkman Center, is featured in the latest edition of UAB Magazine. Click here to read more about SIFAT and how the Sparkman Center supports their activities.

The Centre for Public Health, School of Health System Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences in collaboration with TN Topiwala Medical College and Nair Hospital, Mumbai, welcomes applications for ‘Study India Programme on Urban Health in India’. With the increasing urbanisation, public health is an increasing area of interest. The clinical health cannot be separated from the complex sociocultural and economic context. The health care systems have become very dynamic to meet this challenging situation. The programme intends to have the following objectives:

The Sparkman Center is pleased to announce that the center's Director, Dr. Craig Wilson, has accepted an invitation to serve as a member of the NIH Offices of AIDS Research Advisory Council (OARAC) for the term beginning October 1, 2011 and ending September 30, 2015.

Although Jennie Harris says she had an interest in global health as early as high school, it wasn’t until a few years after finishing her undergraduate studies that she decided she wanted to work in the field. In 2001, she spent several months on a community development project in Guyana. Read more here...

Dr. Franklin weighs in on the nutritional aspects of food aid in a recent NPR article.

The Sparkman Center for Global Health is offering five student scholarships to attend a two-week intensive training course held at the Southern Institute for Appropriate Technology (SIFAT), May 15-28, 2011.
Learn roof-top gardening, build a simple solar cooker, make leaf concentrate to treat malnourished children, learn some simple technologies for clean water and sanitation, build fuel-efficient cookstoves, learn to preserve foods and "refrigerate" without electricity and much more.

Applications are now available for the 2011 Jamaica Course. This 3 credit hour course is open to advanced undergraduate, medical, nursing, and public health students and is appropriate for those who would like to experience a field-based studies course which emphasizes the integration and application of classroom, laboratory and field experiences to foster problem-solving skills for infectious disease ecology, surveillance and control.

Congratulations to Joe Henry for completing a 500 mile run (aptly named the Hunger 500 project) from Washington D.C. to Ontario, Canada. Joe ran for 17 consecutive days, averaging 32 miles a day, to raise awareness about hunger and the annual Universities Fighting World Hunger (UFWH) summit.