People in the news

Bridbord wins alumni honors

Fogarty's Dr. Ken Bridbord, the director of international training and research, has been recognized this spring by two of his alma maters. In February, he was among the initial inductees into the Alumni Hall of Fame at The Cooper Union in New York. In June, Bridbord received the Medical and Biological Sciences Alumni Association's Distinguished Service Award from the University of Chicago.

Bridbord was recognized by NIH in 2007 with the World AIDS Day Award for building a cadre of international research scientists and clinicians trained to combat the disease over 20 years. Since then, many of the 2,000 program trainees have become senior leaders in academia and foreign governments.

He began his career with the Environmental Protection Agency and was instrumental in the long fight to remove lead from gasoline. Bridbord recounts his role in a recent issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

‘Modest shift’ in funding urged

Dr. Robert E. Black, a member of Fogarty’s advisory board and a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, co-authored a recent editorial in The Lancet commenting on the well publicized study in its pages of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant processes.

He and his co-authors said: “A modest shift of the balance of the Foundation’s funding from purchase of commodities to research, from discovery and development to delivery research, from heavily funded diseases to truly neglected diseases ... and from the high-income-country institutions to those in settings where the problems exist would make enormous additional contributions to global health.”
Read The Lancet article and more.

New program officer for Africa

Dr. Letitia Robinson has joined Fogarty as the program officer for sub-Saharan Africa in the Division of International Relations.

In her previous post with the Health Resources and Services Administration, she provided oversight for federal funding HIV/AIDS care in Haiti, South Africa, Guyana, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Rwanda, Botswana, Nigeria and Tanzania. A Ph.D. in international health, she also is a registered nurse.

Staff visit Zambia, Uganda

Program officer Dr. Kathleen Michels visited four different research projects in Zambia funded under Fogarty's Brain Disorders in the Developing World program and for a conference on epilepsy and stigma. Children and adults with epilepsy are more stigmatized and discriminated against than those with HIV/AIDS, she reports.

Fogarty Deputy Director Dr. Michael Johnson traveled to Uganda for the Accordia Global Health Foundation's Infectious Diseases Summit and spoke on "successful leadership development programs."