Manipal University fosters close ties with University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
A report by Manipal LINK - Manipal University's Official News Magazine
Though the relationship was fostered in the arena of Public Health, MU and UAB now have an existing formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop collaborations in other disciplines and streams. The MOU - an understanding between the Board of Trustees of UAB and MU extends the UAB-MU collaboration on a university-wide scale. The arrangement will facilitate exchange of academic staff and researchers; exchange of students and collaborative research and joint academic meetings between both universities.
In most projects around the world, it is the funding agencies that give the much needed lease of life. The primary sponsor for the UAB-MU collaborations is the Fogarty International Center (FIC) which is the international component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA. It was UAB’s Dr Nalini Sathiakumar who successfully received the highly competitive UAB-Fogarty grant which is now operational at Manipal.
AITRP and ITREOH
Early days of this relationship between 2001 and 2005 saw Manipal formally becoming a supplemental site for FIC’s AIDS International Training and Research Programme (AITRP). UAB Investigators Drs Nalini Sathiakumar and Sten Vermund worked along with Manipal’s Dr Vinod Bhat who was the Major Foreign Collaborator for the project. Through this initiative, several training workshops on research methods were held at Manipal, spearheaded by Dr Sathiakumar.
Fogarty’s UAB-South Asia International Training and Research in Environmental and Occupational Health Program (ITREOH) has been a key collaboration project between Manipal University in India, the Aga Khan University in Pakistan and University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. The ITREOH was developed by the FIC in collaboration with the NIH, the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in order to impart training in environmental and occupational health to health scientists, clinicians and epidemiologists along with toxicologists, engineers, industrial hygienists, chemists, and allied health workers.
The UAB-MU partnership has fostered the professional development of a core group of researchers and trainers at Manipal through the ITREOH training workshops, pilot projects and host of other activities.
Training
As part of the ITREOH training initiative a good number of faculty, researchers, doctoral and post graduate students of Manipal have participated in programs organized in USA, India and partner countries.
Regional Training-of Trainer (TOT) workshops. The TOT approach focuses on the development of a core group of faculty mentors, who will serve as trainers for future generations of environmental and occupational health professionals. An annual feature, the program is conducted by a host of senior public health professionals. (see box)
Initially the workshops provided basic training in environmental and occupational health research methodology, but over the last three years, the focus has been on the implementation and evaluation of intervention research, exposure estimations, biomarker measurements and methodological issues in study design. This training hopes to augment activities like investigation and mitigation of health risks associated with environmental and occupational challenges in the region through an interdisciplinary approach. High priority concerns include heavy metals, indoor and outdoor air pollution, pesticides and occupational health. More recently, climate change–related research has also been included as a priority area. Besides substantive topics, training also focuses on research ethics, scientific writing, research proposal development, lay communication and program monitoring and evaluation. A noteworthy component of the TOT workshops has been the opportunity for trainees’ to present new research or results of their ongoing research projects.
International Public Health Summer Institute at UAB.
Each year, the UAB Sparkman Center for Global Health conducts an annual intensive 6-week training designed to upgrade the skills of mid- to senior-level health professionals around the world. It emphasizes skill-based learning in the following areas: Public Health Leadership and Management; Program Monitoring and Evaluation; Applied Epidemiology for Health Professionals; Hot Topics in Global Health; Scientific Writing Seminar; and Case Studies Seminar highlighting Global Public Health Challenges. Untill now, 14 Manipal Faculty have been deputed to Alabama to avail of this opportunity. A major criterion for selection to the Summer Institute is demonstrated research interest. While at UAB, the Manipal faculty also receive intensive mentoring on research proposal development, data analysis and manuscript preparation.
Specialized laboratory training.
As part of a MU-UAB ITREOH research project, PI Dr Satish Rao from Manipal has begun research on the ‘Methylmercury and infant neurological development’ study. This study aims to measure mercury exposure to mothers from analysis of their hair samples. Mr Prasad Bharath from the Dept of Biotechnology at Manipal traveled to the The Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to work with Dr Milena Horvat’s team. Dr Horvat is a global expert in mercury analysis. Mr Bharath and team at Manipal would continue to do research on the subject at Manipal.
Time series analysis manual.
In statistics, signal processing, and many other fields, a time series is a sequence of data, measured at successive times, spaced at often uniform time intervals. From the Department of Biostatistics at Manipal University, Ms. Asha Kamath will spend 2 months at Alabama working with Drs Meleth and Sathiakumar to develop a step-by-step manual for conducting ‘time series analysis’ using specialized software.
ITREOH faculty trainees as research mentors.
ITREOH trainees at Manipal have in turn provided training to graduate students from Alabama. During the last two years, three UAB students spent six to eight week periods at Manipal to acquire field experience in research. Two MPH students worked on ongoing MU-UAB research projects, mentored by Drs. G Arunkumar and Satish Rao. A doctoral student of Epidemiology from UAB, Alabama worked at Manipal mentored by Dr Ramchandra Kamath on a project related to geographic information system (GIS) based surveillance system for tracking Malaria.
Research
The UAB-South Asia ITREOH program believes in the value of practice-based learning and has thus supported, mentored and funded several pilot research projects at Manipal. Awarded after a competitive rigorous peer-review process, only two to three pilot projects are selected each year. One of the main goals of the UAB-South Asia ITREOH is for partner sites to contribute to sustainability by successfully obtaining competitive funding and research grants for large-scale studies. ( See box for list of completed, ongoing, approved and under review projects)
Completed pilot studies have formed the basis for several publications in international peer-reviewed journals and, subsequently, have been expanded as competitive proposals for submission to large funding agencies such as the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), NIH, Health Effects Institute (HEI) among others
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