This fellowship is designed to offer a unique opportunity for medical students with an interest in global health to learn advanced skills in health informatics and digital health appropriate to the resource poor environments and health challenges seen in regions such as Africa, South and East Asia, and Latin America.

Applications will be accepted and reviewed from full-time medical students from The Warren Alpert Medical School who are in good academic standing and are registered for the Fall 2023 semester.

The fellowship will begin May 1, 2023. 

*It is expected that the Fellow will take a gap year from medical school in order to participate in the Global Health Informatics Research Fellowship program. 

Fellows will be chosen based on:

• Submission of a complete application by the deadline.
• Evidence of interest in biomedical informatics, data science and/or mobile health systems.
• A demonstrated interest or experience in Global Health.

The selection committee will include informaticians, clinicians and public health practitioners from Brown University, and Moi University in Kenya. 

The Fellowship application includes an opportunity for applicants to propose a project that will be part of a larger NIH funded research project to improve the quality of care of HIV patients in Western Kenya. 

Dr. Fraser leads the Clinical & Global Health Informatics Evaluation Lab in the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics, and has over 2 decades of experience in Global Health Informatics and has led major projects in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Malawi and Kenya. Key focuses of his work include the OpenMRS Open-Source Electronic Health Record (EHR) used in more than 45 Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), and work on improving diagnosis and management of patients with infectious diseases including HIV and TB.

He has a particular passion for evaluation studies that create real world evidence on whether health information systems improve quality of care and the functioning of health systems.

The Global Health Informatics Fellow with receive training and mentoring from Dr. Fraser with additional mentoring from other clinicians, informaticians and public health researchers involved in the work both at Brown and Moi University.  Part of this training will involve taking Dr. Fraser’s Fall 2023 course, Evaluation of Health Information Systems (BIOL2075).  This course includes both quantitative and qualitative research methods and many examples from Global Health.

The Fellow will be registered as an active student under the Academic Scholar Program (ASP). The Fellow will be supported with a stipend plus additional funds to cover health insurance, the health service fee, travel to Kenya and ASP tuition fees.  

The project chosen by the fellow will be part of the "Data Science for Decision Support in the HIV Care Cascade" an NIH research project to improve the quality of care of HIV patients in the AMPATH project in Western Kenya.

• Aim 1 includes the use of machine learning and data science methods to create models to predict loss to follow up or treatment failure.  
• Aim 2 focuses on the design and implementation of advanced clinical decision support tools in the OpenMRS EHR system.
• Aim 3 is a cluster randomized controlled trial of the decision support tools in 30 Kenyan health centers.

Brown University has a longstanding relationship with AMPATH and faculty, students and clinical trainees from Brown regularly travel to the site.