The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Birmingham launched a new initiative earlier this year by selecting three strategic projects to receive start-up funding.
Birmingham-Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement & Education’s Signature Initiative was announced in April 2024 and centers on a $400,000 investment in expanding collaborative research on global health, sustainability, and education access and equity. Additionally, this investment will strengthen collaboration between both institutions alongside partners and organizations in the Global South.
The projects to receive initial funding are: Accelerating Climate Action; Education Access and Equity: Empowering Education with the Global South; and the BRIDGE Global Health Institute.”
Accelerating Climate Action will support sustainability research and teaching communities at both institutions, collaborating with partners from the Global South in the lead-up to COP30 in Brazil.
Teams from both institutions will prepare impactful briefing papers, which will be synthesized into a report to be launched at COP30, focusing on how climate action and sustainable development must be accelerated to meet the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals. Project leads include Birmingham scholars Aleksandra Cavoski, Sophie Comer-Warner, David M. Hannah, Julia Myatt, Francis Pope, and Jonathan Radcliffe along with Illinois scholars Praveen Kumar, Warren Lavey, and Leon Liebenberg.
Education Access and Equity: Empowering Education with the Global South aims to create an inclusive environment for scholars to engage with educators, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners from the Global South and beyond.
The scholars leading the project will engage in cross-cultural dialogue and research during year one, culminating in a global conference in year two. Project leads include Birmingham scholars Meng Tian, Eleni Stamou, Dina Kiwan, Francesca Peruzzo, Sanam Yaqub (Dubai), Tarek Mostafa, and Christopher Millward together with Illinois scholars Jessica Li, Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela, Sammer Jones, Chrystalla Mouza, Allison Witt, Jon Hale, Gabe Rodriguez, Helen Neville, and Rachel Roegman.
The BRIDGE Global Health Institute will explore epidemiology/applied health with a focus on women and children’s health, microbiology (including microbiome) and health, diagnostics and community-based solutions, and wider determinants of health inequalities in society. The project will be led by Rachel Jordan (Birmingham), Jon Frampton (Birmingham), and Zeynep Madak-Erdogan (Illinois).
A portion of the Signature Initiative funding will also support the newly launched Global South Fellowship, which will promote research collaboration and partnership development for early career researchers from countries within the Global South.
Birmingham and Illinois have closely collaborated under the BRIDGE framework for over a decade.
BRIDGE currently supports around 115 collaborative projects addressing major global challenges. These projects have involved academics across all five Birmingham colleges and 13 colleges, schools, and four research institutes at Illinois.
Since the partnership's inception in March 2014, more than $1.1 million has been invested in collaborative projects, leading to an additional $5.4 million in external funding.
Learn more about BRIDGE at https://bridgepartnership.org/.
Marta Schneider is the director for global communications in Illinois International. She can be reached at martasch@illinois.edu.