Chapter 4 - Academic Goals and Strategies to Build Distinction
The Global Health Institute: Duke's Global Health Institute will address one of the most important problems of our time: the health disparities both in our local community and worldwide. Global poverty, mal-distribution of resources between developed and developing nations, lack of infrastructure in developing countries, global climate change and environmental pollution, all contribute to the inability of societies to deal with problems that adversely affect global health. Adding to these factors are immigration from developing countries, military health issues, bioterrorism, biologic agent threats, and naturally emerging, new infectious diseases. Health issues are now global in scope, both in terms of disease prevention and therapy, and research on infectious diseases and the applications of that research require an equally global dimension.
We see in these global health challenges a particularly promising opportunity to expand our research and educational programs, with potential that will directly allow Duke students and faculty to contribute to global health. Global health is not only a moral imperative but also a key to global stability. As a result, the world's governments and multilateral institutions have begun to commit serious resources to address global health issues.
Duke's Global Health Institute will bring together interdisciplinary teams to work with partners to solve highly complex health problems and to train the next generation of global health scholars. With the fundamental goal to improve the human condition, this program could be solely focused on the medical center and health system. We recognize, however, that the ability to affect strategies for improving global health requires not only understanding transmission and prevention of diseases, but how different cultures view their health concerns, how medical realities are embedded in psychosocial, historical, demographic, economic, legal, management, and political contexts, how to best relate the advances afforded by modern medicine to a variety of cultures, and how human impact on the environment affects disease. The humanities and their ability to examine and convey understanding about cultures are essential; indeed, science divorced from an understanding of human cultures and their interactions is unlikely to effectively improve the human condition.
The Institute for Brain, Mind, Genes, and Behavior: Increasingly, researchers must meld different - and often historically unconnected - disciplines if they are to develop an understanding of the human brain, mind, and behavior. Duke is well positioned to become a dominant force in the study of brain, mind and behavior, if we coordinate activities on campus and build on the collective strength of our interdisciplinary teams to address the field's most important problems. To do so, we will create a new institute for interdisciplinary research and scholarship that can respond quickly to new developments and research trends at the intersection of brain sciences, behavioral sciences, and genomics. This effort builds upon our departments, such as philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and neurobiology, as well as interdisciplinary centers, such as the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences, the Conte Center for the Neuroscience of Depression, the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, and the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. Taking advantage of these collective assets and empowering collaborative work among these units, we will mount distinctive efforts in imaging brain structure and function, examining the co-variation of genetic variability with behavioral traits and cognitive competences, the development of drugs that alter mood or enhance or diminish memories, relating brain function to ethical and moral behavior, and relating economic decisions to brain states. The institute will also assume a translational function so that interdisciplinary research is applied to issues of health and/or policy, as appropriate.
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