Dr. Flora Katz's impact on DITR... and Fogarty
November/December 2024 | Volume 23 Number 6
Photo courtesy of University of VirginiaA University of Virginia Framework project in South Africa focuses on water purification systems.
Dr. Flora Katz will retire from her position as Director of the Division of Training and Research (DITR) in January 2025. At Fogarty, DITR is one of four key organizational structures alongside the Division of International Science Policy, Planning and Evaluation (DISPPE), the Division of International Relations (DIR), and the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies (DIEPS).
DITR aims to build the scientific research pipeline across the globe by administering grants and fellowship programs at sites in more than 100 countries. About two-thirds of the awards support research training, while the remaining third focus on scientific discovery.
Grants serve as the building blocks for DITR’s programs. Research training programs focus on infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria; chronic conditions, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes; trauma and injury; and bioethics. DITR’s scientific discovery programs also highlight a range of topics, including brain disorders; mobile technologies and health (mHealth); ecology and evolution of infectious diseases; environmental and occupational health; HIV and stigma; and HIV and non-communicable co-morbidities.
DITR's impact is felt both at home and abroad. Nearly a quarter of DITR’s grantees are research institutions in low- and middle-income countries. The remaining awards support scientists at U.S. institutions who collaborate with colleagues in lower resource regions. Fogarty's peer-reviewed research grants are designed to be collaborative, long term and flexible.
Flora Katz’s impact on DITR
Dr. Flora Katz began her career at Fogarty as a program officer in 2001 and gradually assumed greater responsibility within DITR over time. Her portfolio has included a wide spectrum of programs; she directly managed 12 different programs (starting five from scratch), and facilitated, advocated, revised, reimagined or developed many others.
“One of the lovely things about Fogarty is, if you have an idea, you get a lot of support to develop it,” says Katz.
Three projects are of particular importance to Katz
International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG)
The
International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) program had been ongoing for nearly 10 years when she arrived at Fogarty and began co-leading it with Dr. Josh Rosenthal. (Eventually Rosenthal, who is now a Fogarty senior scientist, moved on, and Katz took over ICBG.) “It was a fascinating, interdisciplinary program that tied drug discovery from natural products to incentives for countries to conserve their biodiversity,” says Katz. “You had to bring in many different players, including the policy community, while creating public-private partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. It was a constant learning curve and very complicated: How do you compensate countries for use of their biodiversity?”
Framework Programs
Starting in 2006, Katz began to construct a collection of
Framework Programs, in response to global health becoming relevant and gaining urgency for the younger generation. “We used that tipping point to offer an opportunity to institutions in the U.S. and LMICs to develop curricula around global health—framework programs,” she explains. In the initial educational program, stipulations included that at least three distinct departments collaborate on and jointly teach the curriculum. “With multiple perspectives in the room, the students would understand that many scientific viewpoints were needed to solve some of these global health problems.” Projects were wildly diverse, with most featuring components in public health and medicine, but “with engineering and communications and arts and whatever you can think of also added to the mix,” recalls Katz. “Everybody wanted to register for these courses, 300 or 500 people would sign up, it was unexpected and overwhelming.” Some universities institutionalized these programs and continue them today.
MEPI Junior Faculty (MEPI Jr)
The final program Katz highlights is her sequel to the Medical Education in Africa (MEPI) program, which was built with funding from PEPFAR and the NIH Common Fund:
MEPI Junior Faculty (MEPI Jr). “We asked those involved in MEPI, ‘What’s missing?’ They told us, ‘We have a lot of junior faculty with PhD degrees, but they're not doing any research—they’re an untapped resource.’” Katz responded by creating MEPI Jr, which funded former MEPI institutions to provide fellowships across at least three topic areas. “Almost all 11 of the grantee institutions offered two-year fellowships so junior faculty could do mentored research and learn career development skills as a cohort.” Cohort mentoring turned out to be extremely effective and resulted in an unanticipated outcome. “What happened was they organically developed a real multidisciplinarity in their projects, they began to cohere as a multidisciplinary community in a way that I never could achieve in the previous 10 years of trying to force it! I probably learned more from that program than any other.”
Fogarty International Center
Fogarty’s Rachel Sturke, PhD, Josh Rosenthal, PhD, and Flora Katz, PhD, discuss DITR programs
Work behind the scenes
Katz praises three additional DITR achievements, though her role in each was limited to advocate and facilitator. “The
Emerging Global Leaders Award (K43) is an important program since it’s the only career development program at NIH that allows non-U.S. nationals to be supported. It’s a major DITR achievement in the last 10 years.”
A second triumph is the
Mobile Health (mHealth) program, which rose from the ashes of a failed Common Fund proposal that Katz had worked on. “Fogarty Director Dr. Roger Glass was extremely enthusiastic, so we decided to do it ourselves.” Katz hired AAAS Fellow Dr. Laura Povlich to develop the program, which aims to build an evidentiary base for using mHealth as a telemedicine technology (reminding people via texts to do something) or as a medical device (providing point of care diagnostics or ultrasound in a distributed manner).
One final noteworthy DITR accomplishment is a Common Fund initiative,
Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa). Katz was very involved in putting together the planning committee and writing the proposal, though others, notably Povlich, now a program officer, developed and managed it.
DITR’s future… and past
Kilmarx recognizes that Katz will be difficult to replace, yet he doesn’t see any need to make substantial change within DITR. “We have limited resources so most go to the strongest applicants and centers of excellence and countries that we’ve assisted in the past,” he says. Still, he recalls how the department under Katz’s leadership provided funding for capacity building in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia during and after the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014-2016. Kilmarx notes, “Just as we did in West Africa, we will try to build capacity in countries that haven't been as successful or with lower levels of capacity.”
Photo courtesy of Richard LordStudents learn in Ghana's MEPI program
As she looks back on her 23 years at Fogarty, Katz primarily sees constancy over time. “One major thing is we went from paper to electronic, which changed a lot of processes for everyone, but Fogarty's mission has never changed,” she says. “All organizations keep moving forward and the areas of emphasis may evolve somewhat, yet we build on our successes.” DITR’s earliest HIV/AIDS programs, which spawned a plethora of efficacious projects and programs, are a case in point.
“Each of us who have been here for a long time have watched how a trainee in our original program is now the head of an important institution in their country. We've seen promising institutions become powerhouses. Capacity building is a very slow process, yet we do see progress on a long timescale.”
More information
Updated December 10, 2024
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