Global Health Educators Community (GHECo)

GHECo is an international, multidisciplinary community of practice for global health educators that began hosting monthly Virtual Teachers’ Lounges (VTLs) and other events in September 2023. GHECo membership is free to everyone; CUGH membership is not required. To receive invitations to the monthly online GHECo meetings and special events, please sign up for the mailing list using the form. Questions about GHECo may be directed to the founding co-chairs, Kathryn H. Jacobsen (University of Richmond) and Caryl E. Waggett (Allegheny College)

To receive invitations to the monthly GHECo meetings and special events, please create an account. All global health educators are welcome to join the listserv and attend GHECo events. CUGH membership is not a requirement for participation in the community.

Values

Describe the history, values, and functions of global health.

Globalization

Explain how travel, trade, and other aspects of globalization contribute to health, disease, and health disparities.

Socioeconomics

Summarize the economic, social, cultural, and political contributors to individual and population health.

Environment

Examine the connections between human health and environmental health, including considerations of water, sanitation, air quality, urbanization, ecosystem health, and climate change

Ethics

Discuss the relationship between human rights and global health.

Healthcare Systems

Compare the financing and delivery of medical care in countries with different types of health systems and different income levels.

Governance

Examine the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of the agencies and organizations involved in prioritizing, financing, and implementing public health interventions locally and internationally.

Epidemiology

Compare the burden of disease, disability, and death from infectious diseases, reproductive health issues, malnutrition, noncommunicable diseases, mental health disorders, and injuries in countries with different income levels

Interventions

Identify evidence-based, cost-effective, sustainable interventions for promoting health and preventing illness across the lifespan from the prenatal period through older adulthood.

Evaluation

Evaluate policies that seek to solve major population health concerns and achieve health equity.

Earth System Changes

Identify the natural and human-generated causes of altered biogeochemical flows, climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollutants, land-system change, freshwater change, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and other global environmental changes.

Ecological Systems

Describe how the ecosystems formed by human, domestic animal, wildlife, plant, and other biotic populations are affected by human actions across trophic levels, geographies, and time.

Human Health Outcomes

Explain how extreme temperature and precipitation events, reduced air and water quality, population displacement, and other global changes increase incidence, prevalence, and mortality from infectious diseases; malnutrition; respiratory, cardiovascular, and other noncommunicable diseases; sexual and reproductive health issues; psychosocial health disorders; and injuries.

Risk Assessment

Analyze how economic, social, cultural, political, environmental, technological, and health systems affect ecosystem and human vulnerability and resilience to environmental change.

Governance

Evaluate how local, national, and international laws and policies have contributed to environmental problems and solutions.

Actions

Compare the roles and responsibilities of governments, the commercial sector, civil society organizations, communities, and individuals in promoting conservation, restoration, mitigation, and adaptation related to environmental change

Ethics

Articulate the principles of intragenerational, interspecies, and intergenerational environmental justice.

Communication

Demonstrate environmental and health literacy by accessing, evaluating, and communicating reliable scientific information about global environmental change.

July 27, 2026

Upcoming GHECo Events

• GHECo–GLOHRA Research Competencies | September 24: GHECo and the German Alliance for Global Health Research (GLOHRA) Global Health Academy will be co-hosting an online dialogue about research competencies at 17:00–18:30 CET (= 11:00am–12:30pm New York time). 
  • Access GLOHRA’s Catalog of Competencies in Global Health Research at https://www.globalhealth.de/academy/competencies/. 
  • Learn more and register to participate in the conversation at https://www.globalhealth.de/news/view/dialogue-events-on-the-catalogue-of-competencies-gheco/
• GHECo Global Health Humanities Week | October 7–9: A series of three hour-long webinars will be held at 11am New York time, with each panel exploring ideas for drawing on the humanities to teach about global health. This webinar series is a collaboration of GHECo, the CUGH Global Health Humanities Working Group, and the CUGH Planetary Health-One Health-Environmental Health Working Group. The first session will focus on planetary health and Indigenous artistic traditions, the second on art as advocacy, and the third on One Health through an artistic lens.
• CUGH Virtual Global Health Week | October 27–29: CUGH’s annual event will feature more than a dozen hour-long free webinars. 
• GHECo Webinar | November 5: Dr. Olusoji Adeyi, author of Global Health in Practice: Investing Amidst Pandemics, Denial of Evidence, and Neo-dependency (https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/12520), will be the featured speaker for a special GHECo webinar at 11am New York time.
• Annual GHECo Educators Workshop @CUGH | 25 February 2027: This in-person event will be held from 9am to noon in Lima, Peru, on the first day of the annual meeting of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health. Learn more, submit a conference abstract, and register for the conference at https://cughlima2027.org.
• Teach Global Health Summer Institute | 24–26 May 2027: This 3-day in-person workshop on curriculum and course design will be held in Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, USA.  Details and the application form will be posted soon at https://www.teachglobalhealth.org.

Other Upcoming Online Events (all are free!)

• TEACHING | July 29: Boston University is hosting a 90-minute webinar on “The Future of Public Health Teaching” at 1pm New York time.  Register at https://publichealthconversation.org/conversations/uncategorized/the-future-of-public-health-teaching/. 
• GLOBAL HEALTH EDUCATION | September 9:  The Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) will host a symposium celebrating the 30th anniversary of the tropEd network from 9:00-17:00 CEST.  A livestream of plenary sessions on transformational learning, innovating teaching methods, international collaboration in education, and AI and experiential learning will be available. Register for remote access at https://www.swisstph.ch/en/about/events/fki-symposium-2026 no later than September 2.

Student Competition from Operation Outbreak

This fall, Operation Outbreak is launching a student competition in which teams will take on real-world biosecurity challenges through a series of classified “operations.” Students will collaborate with classmates and a faculty sponsor to investigate community preparedness, compete for rewards, and unlock new challenges as they go. Registration for the Mission Biosecurity Student Competition is already open.  Watch the trailer and sign up for updates at https://operationoutbreak.org/competition/.

New Global Health Education Publications and Resources

• The Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative is recruiting a new cohort for its Fair Trade Learning Community of Practice.  Learn about Fair Trade Learning at https://www.cbglcollab.org/ftl. Educators who are available to meet five times (August 31, September 21, October 19, November 16, December 14) from 12pm to 1pm New York time are invited to apply to join the cohort at https://wpi.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9XYEwKZ6eUC72su. 
• An article by professors at the University of Waterloo on “Towards global citizenship: investigating and measuring empathy for the other in global health education” was just published in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2026.2668711).
• The Council on Foreign Relations has launched a new CFR Education website with resources for teaching about global health, foreign policy, human rights, international institutions, and other topics: https://www.cfr.org/education/teach.

Global Health Podcasts – Do you have favorites to recommend?

Devex has made more than 150 episodes of This Week in Global Development freely available on YouTube, Spotify, and several other platforms (https://www.devex.com/focus/this-week-in-global-development).  Do you have favorite free global health podcasts that you recommend to your students and mentees?  If so, please send your recommendations to the GHECo newsletter editors so they can be shared in a future issue.

Upcoming Conferences

• World Health Summit 2026 in Berlin | October 11–13:  Registration for this annual event is open at https://www.worldhealthsummit.org/events/annual-whs/2026.
• Canadian Conference on Global Health 2026 in Montreal and online | October 16–18: Registration for this hybrid conference is available at https://cagh-acsm.org/ccgh/.
• APRU Global Health Conference 2026 in Hong Kong | December 7–9: Abstracts for the annual Association of Pacific Rim Universities meeting are due July 31. Details at https://cuhk.aprughc2026.hk.
• CUGH 2027 in Lima, Peru | February 25–28: The 2027 annual meeting of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) will be held in Lima, Peru.  Registration is already open, and the organizers are ready to assist participants with visa letters and other logistics.  The deadline to submit abstracts for posters and panels is August 31.  The annual GHECo educators’ workshop is scheduled to begin at 9am on February 25, so conference attendees should plan to arrive early enough to participate in morning workshops.  There will be a variety of special events for students and trainees, including student poster awards, and housing with local students in Peru will be available for international student attendees.  Learn more and register at https://cughlima2027.org.

Help us grow GHECo

If you have colleagues and friends who are involved in global health education but are not yet on the GHECo mailing list, please invite them to sign up at https://cugh.groups.io/g/gheco. 

Do you have items for the GHECo Newsletter?

All of the items in this newsletter have been shared by GHECo members.  Thank you for your contributions!  Please email information about upcoming events and new resources related to global health education to kjacobse@richmond.edu and cwaggett@allegheny.edu so that we can share them in the next GHECo newsletter.