Engaging Undergraduates in Global Health Technology Innovation

摘要

It takes only 90 minutes to fly from Miami to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but the cities are a world apart. A baby born in Port-au-Prince is nearly 10 times as likely to die before age 1 as an infant born in Miami. Life expectancy on the island is almost 20 years shorter than in the United States. That such disparities persist despite renewed pub-lic and private commitments to improve global health illustrates the need for a new generation of innovators who recognize the challenges and can design and deploy new health-care technologies that are both highly effective and affordable (1). In response, we and others have developed educational pro-grams to engage globally minded health-care innovators (2). Our approach is inspired by a Haitian saying that captures the essence of inquiry-based education: "You don't learn to swim in the library; you learn to swim in the river."