Global Health

Academic Practice Track

Our Global Health Emergency Medicine Track mission aims to create equitable relationships between high- and low-resource health environments, focusing on low-income countries and territories. We approach global EM by understanding structural and social determinants of health using a socioecological framing of health justice to improve emergency care for all people worldwide. We seek to examine access to and reception of high-quality, respectful, and definitive emergency care systems and emergency health access and delivery in more fragile content and climate/disaster-related settings. We will examine the role that Global EM has been complicit in: “voluntourism,” research authorship inequity, under-representation and under-valuation of technical expertise, and the need to shift away from top-down approaches.

The goals of the Global EM Academic Practice Track are to help residents:

Gain academic expertise with concepts in Global Emergency Medicine and the socioecological structure of its interface with other global health systems
Understand differences in the inputs to and the interventions for improving health outcomes in various global settings, including but not limited to point-of-care ultrasound, testing, and treatment of endemic diseases, responding to disease outbreaks, and building and implementing data systems
Establish mentoring relationships and build a personal network for project development within the NYP, Columbia University, Weill Cornell systems, and beyond
Substantial contribution to a project or scholarly activity that develops an essential aspect of Global Emergency Medicine
Explore partnerships for Emergency Medicine training/residency in Rwanda or Tanzania
Develop relationships and skills to become future leaders in Global Emergency Medicine at the residency, state, and national levels

Track Directors

Dr. Rachel Moresky

Dr. Moresky is an Associate Professor in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health, Program on Forced Migration and Health and in the Columbia University Department of Emergency Medicine, as well as an Honorary appointment at the University of Rwanda, College of Medicine and Health Sciences. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Moresky has combined her expertise in engineering, emergency medicine, and global public health inequities in healthcare access and care in setting with limited health resources. Her focus has been on health systems integration of primary care system with complex adaptive emergency care systems.

In 2004 she founded the Columbia University sidHARTe - Strengthening Emergency Systems Program. The sidHARTe Program has partnered with national and local governments, universities, medical associations, and NGOs through technical exchange, data-driven policy development, and implementation support and science. The sidHARTe Program has worked under governments' direction in improving public sector solutions in India, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, Honduras, and Cambodia with support from NGOs, foundations, USAID, CDC, Global Fund, and the World Bank. She is a Co-PI on a USAID-supported Implementation Research Acute Care and Emergency Referral Systems (ACERS) Program in rural Ghana under CRS, the Ghana Health Service, in partnership with the University of Ghana.

Dr. Moresky also founded the Columbia University Global Emergency Medicine Fellowship, a program that mentors Emergency Physicians in humanitarian action, disaster response, and health systems implementation research. Since 2006 The Fellowship has produced global health leaders. These former fellows have taken leadership roles at organizations such as the WHO, WHO Global Health Cluster, IRC, MSF, IMC, CDC, Ministries of Health, and Emergency Medicine programs worldwide. MSF, IMC, CDC, Ministries of Health, and Emergency Medicine programs worldwide. She is a recipient of the SAEM Global Emergency Medicine Academy Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award,

Dr. Radhika Sundararajan

Dr. Sundararajan is an Emergency Physician and Anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, M.D. from NYU School of Medicine and completed Emergency Medicine residency at the Harvard-Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency program (HAEMR). She is an Assistant Professor in the Weill Cornell Department of Emergency Medicine, where she is Director of Global Emergency Medicine Research, and in the Weill Cornell Center for Global Health. Her work focuses on understanding the healthcare-seeking trajectory, and identifying barriers to biomedical care, for both children and adults in low resource settings. She has conducted mixed methods research on these topics in India, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tanzania. Her current work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and focuses on expanding access to HIV services among communities who utilize traditional medicine. She has conducted cluster randomized controlled trials in eastern Africa demonstrating the effectiveness of novel community-based HIV testing programs. Dr. Sundararajan's research interests include medical pluralism, structural violence, health disparities, and implementation science. She mentors trainees interested in developing careers in global health research, particularly supporting women in emergency medicine.