The Duke Global Health Institute hosted the seventh annual Global Health Research Showcase on November 5, featuring a whopping 52 posters by Duke students of all levels from across the university. Ten posters were from year-long Bass Connections project teams. Another nine posters highlighted the Student Research Training summer program, in which students work with faculty members and local partners to develop, implement and asses a community-based global health project.

The winning Bass Connections poster was Help Desk: A Student-led Initiative to Address Social Determinants of Health in Durham, by Sahil Sandhu ’20, Lillian Blanchard ’19, Veronica Sotelo Munoz (M.P.P.) and Jackie Xu ’19 from the Global Alliance on Disability and Health Innovation (GANDHI) project team. Last spring, Sandhu, Blanchard and Xu received a Bass Connections Follow-on Research Award to design and implement a “Help Desk” in the Duke Health system. This initiative will connect patients with community partner organizations that meet patients’ social and legal needs, and continues the GANDHI team’s mission of researching and assessing support systems designed to improve patients’ quality of life during the transition from hospital to home.

Rinchen Doma ’19 won the student fieldwork photo contest for A New Pursuit, which she took as part of her work with the Bass Connections project team Developing a Mobile Phone-based Community Health Program for Hypertension Control in Nepal. “The long-term goal is to develop a digital-based mobile solution to manage blood pressure in hypertensive patients in rural Nepal,” Doma explained. “The goal of this fieldwork in particular was to gather data from the target population to understand the needs and challenges in the communities.”

Stephanie Jaffe ’19 received the people’s choice award for her photo Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, taken during her Student Research Training project in Kenya. “This past summer, I was based in Nairobi, Kenya, and I worked for a company called Nivi, co-founded by Duke Global Health Institute assistant professor Eric Green,” Jaffe said. “I was involved in marketing the product askNivi, an online platform for providing free information about sexual and reproductive health and free family planning screenings. I helped to create a trial campus ambassador program to market this product to university students and designed workshops in which we provided leadership training and marketing training and facilitated conversations about the importance of sexual and reproductive health.”

Read a recap of the event and view a multimedia feature of the photo contest winners on the Duke Global Health Institute website.

Learn More

• Join us for Bass Connections in the World on November 28. Students from four project teams will give lightning talks on their collaborative research on global health and the environment.
• Explore Bass Connections in Global Health.
• Mark your calendar for the Bass Connections Fair on January 22.

Image at top by Amey Chaware