16 Jul Call for Abstracts: Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Masterclass 2021
Call for Abstracts
Interdisciplinary Masterclass in Global Health and Development:
The Future of vaccination
2 & 3 November 2021
Led by the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development and the Joep Lange Institute
Are you a PhD candidate or a Postdoctoral fellow wanting to share your insights at a Masterclass led by world-renowned global health researchers and thought leaders?
We invite you to submit your abstract for an interdisciplinary Masterclass in Global Health as part of the Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Program. The Masterclass will consist of two online sessions.
Two annual Masterclasses were held previously in October 2019 and November 2020. Each Masterclass has a theme, with the first being ‘Access to Care: Making Health Markets Work for the Poor’ and the second being ‘Societal Preparedness for Epidemics.’ The Masterclass theme for the year 2021 is ‘The Future of Vaccination’.
The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated that vaccine research, development, and rollout is crucial for combating emerging infectious disease outbreaks, but has also revealed many unanticipated side effects, as well as legal, ethical and behavioral questions. Though the current pandemic has brought to light many such issues, the masterclass is not meant to be singularly focused on the SARS-CoV-19. We will bring into discussion topics of vaccine development and evaluation, vaccine acceptance and hesitancy, and the issue of patents and investments in vaccine research and development.
Late-stage PhD students and early postdoctoral researchers are encouraged to individually submit abstracts of their research that addresses the above topics, related to vaccine research, development and delivery. The abstract review team will use academic excellence and relevance of the research for the theme as the main criteria. It will, furthermore, consider the diversity within the classes (subject, discipline, gender, geography, etc.) and the applicants’ motivation.
Led by Prof. Anna Vassall, Prof. Mark Dybul, Prof. Catherine Kyobutungi and Prof. Melissa Parker, two online masterclasses will be held with two Masters facilitating each class. Each class will have a select number of participants who will be offered the opportunity to present and discuss their research. This is an opportunity to share your research, explore innovative ideas and learn from other researchers in different fields of Global Health and Development, in an interdisciplinary research setting.
The abstracts will be published on the program website. To review past masterclasses and learn more about previously accepted research, please visit jlc.aighd.org.
Please submit your abstract via the following link no later than 27 September 2021:
How to submit your abstract:
Please make sure to include the following sections in your abstract:
- Name of author(s)
- Title
- Background
- Methods
- Results
- Conclusion
- Motivation for applying to the Masterclass
Below you find the guiding criteria for the abstract submission:
- To submit your abstract, go to the following website and submit through the form here: Submit Abstract
- Please include a short biography and a photograph of yourself along with the submission.
- Each entry should have a maximum of 250 words.
- Check your email for confirmation of the submission and contact the organizers by the contact information presented below if you have not received a confirmation email once you have submitted your abstract. Please also check your spam box.
Contact information
If you encounter any challenges with submission, you can contact AIGHD’s Nina Schat at n.schat@aighd.org or Diede Smith at d.smith@aighd.org
About the Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Program
The Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Program was established in 2015 in memory of prolific HIV activist, medical doctor and scientist Prof. Joep Lange. Funded in part by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the program was commissioned by the Joep Lange Institute and is based at the Department of Global Health-Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD) at the Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam.
Masters’ Bios
Professor Anna Vassall
I am a health economist with over twenty-five years of experience in economic analysis and research in low- and middle-income countries. I have extensive experience supporting national health planning and priority setting, aid effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness analysis in a wide range of low and middle income countries. I have directed and provided economic support to European Community and World Bank funded health sector reform and development projects in Yemen, East Timor, Syria and Sudan: supporting the development of health benefit package, national strategic plans and medium term expenditure frameworks.
I am currently the Director of the Centre for Health Economics in London (CHiL) and sits in the Department of Global Health at LSHTM. I have led a wide range of influential economic analyses on HIV prevention for key populations (Avahan programme), the integration and organisation of HIV care and treatment services (Integra project), and new diagnostics for TB (Xpert MTB/RIF) and the prevention of violence against women and girls (What Works). I have an interest in methods to incorporate health systems and other constraints and a societal/equity focused perspective into economic evaluation and priority setting. I am the module organiser for LSHTM’s distance learning course in economic evaluation.
I am a founding member of the TB-MAC modelling consortium and sit on the technical advisory group for health technology assessment at WHO. I sat on the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for the WHO’s Global TB Programme (STAG-TB) and Task Force on Catastrophic Cost Measurement for TB, and on the Lancet Commission for TB. I was a lead investigator of the Global Health Costing Consortium; a Bill and Melinda Gates funded project to estimate and analyse HIV, TB and other health service costs globally. I am currently supporting several countries develop health benefit packages as part of the Disease Control Priorities (DCP) project. I was awarded the Joep Lange Chair at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health, University of Amsterdam in 2018.
Professor Mark Dybul
The Honorable Mark Dybul, MD, is the Co-Director of the Center for Global Health Practice and Impact, and Professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center. He is also a Chair and Fellow with the Joep Lange Institute.
A well-recognized global health expert and humanitarian, Dr. Dybul served as Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and as the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, overseeing the implementation of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Dr. Dybul served as a HIV research fellow at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under director Dr. Anthony Fauci in the late 1990s. He conducted basic and clinical HIV research at NIAID, and eventually conducted the first randomized, controlled trial with combination antiretroviral therapy with HIV patients in Africa.
He went on to lead President George W. Bush’s International Prevention of Mother and Child HIV initiative for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and in 2006 was named U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator. As U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, he led the implementation of PEPFAR, a health initiative Dr. Dybul helped create. He later became the inaugural Global Health Fellow of the George W. Bush Institute.
Professor Catherine Kyobutungi
Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi is the Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC). She was formerly the Center’s Director of Research and has served APHRC in several leadership roles over the past 15 years, having joined as a post-doctoral fellow in 2006.
She holds a Ph.D. in Epidemiology and a Master of Science in Community Health and Health Management from the University of Heidelberg. Prior to her graduate studies, Catherine studied medicine at Makerere University, Kampala, after which she worked as a medical officer in Western Uganda for three years.
In 2018, Catherine was elected as a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and in 2019, she was selected as a Joep Lange Chair at the University of Amsterdam; a position in which she investigates chronic disease management in African countries. She is the co-director of the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA), a program that seeks to build and strengthen the capacity of African research leaders and has trained more than 230 PhD fellows in eight African universities.
Professor Melissa Parker
I am a member of the Department of Global Health and Development. My research builds on a multi-disciplinary training in Human Sciences and a DPhil (which combined methods and approaches current in social and biological anthropology) from Oxford University. Research questions typically emerge from extensive periods of ethnographic fieldwork and engage with global health policies and practice. Topics investigated include: epidemic preparedness and response, mental health and healing in war zones, social and political legacies of mass forced displacement, and biosocial approaches to the control of neglected tropical diseases in Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.
In 2014, I established the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform with colleagues from Sierra Leone and the UK. This proved a useful model for enabling expertise across the social sciences to useful inform the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and the Platform now engages with a broader range of issues through the Social Sciences in Humanitarian Action Platform. In 2020 and 2021, I contributed to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours and the ethnicity subgroup of SAGE.