The winners of the 8th APRU Global Health Virtual Case Competition 2023 and the 9th APRU Global Health Student Poster Contest 2023 were announced at the Global Health Conference between October 25 and 27 at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City. The 8th Virtual Case Competition 2023 was won by The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s team Hello Hong Kong for a highly inspiring video showing ways to improve refugees’ access to Hong Kong health services. The 9th Student Poster Contest was won by Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Jessica Lopez Espinosa (Undergraduate Category) and Fudan University’s Shaolong Ren (Graduate Category). The winners were chosen by judges and delegates at the 16th APRU Global Health Conference 2023 in Mexico.  For the 8th Virtual Case Competition, teams of 3-6 students received a challenge created in partnership with the UNHCR titled “Bridging Barriers to Care: Reaching Urban Migrant Communities.” The competition involved a total of 49 teams from 19 universities from Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Mexico, Nepal, Senegal, Singapore, Thailand, and the US. The winning team received a US$1,000 prize. For the 9th Student Poster Contest, undergraduate and graduate students were invited to submit a poster related to global health. Submissions came from China, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Mexico, the Philippines, and the US. Each 1st place winner received a US$500 prize. The 16th APRU Global Health Conference 2023 facilitated inter-sectoral exchanges of world-class expertise and dissemination of cutting-edge research on equity in health. Organized by the School of Medicine and Health Sciences of Tecnológico de Monterrey in collaboration with the APRU Global Health Program, the event marked the first time the Global Health annual conference took place in Latin America and first in person APRU Global Health Conference after the Covid-19 pandemic. Finalists – 8th APRU Global Health Virtual Case Competition 2023 (in no particular order):  Winner: Hello Hong Kong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) – view the video here Health Defenders (Sun Yat-Sen University) – view the video here Eblouissant (Simon Fraser University) – view the video here Finalists – 9th APRU Global Health Student Poster Contest 2023 Undergraduate Category (in no particular order) Suet Man Li (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Winner: Jessica Lopez Espinosa (Tecnológico de Monterrey) Khen Jee Faburada (Manila Central University) Graduate Category (in no particular order) Brooke Edwards (University of Southern California) Junyi Shi (Peking University) Winner: Shaolong Ren (Fudan University)

Photos Credit: Tecnológico de Monterrey   The 16th APRU Global Health Conference 2023 took place from October 25 to 27 in Mexico City as the first in-person annual event of the Global Health Program after the Covid-19 pandemic. Hosted by the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at Tecnológico de Monterrey, the conference attracted 98 public health experts and stakeholders from 26 institutions in 11 economies to exchange their insights into this year topic — Equity in Health — across thought-provoking panel discussions and working group meetings in three days. The event marked the first time that an APRU Global Health Conference was held in Latin America. “The conference took place in a truly global spirit, with many renowned speakers with diverse global and public health expertise providing rich and valuable discussions on how precarious health disparities can be tackled,” said José Páez, Vice-Rector for International Affairs of Tecnológico de Monterrey. José Páez, Vice-Rector for International Affairs of Tecnológico de Monterrey   The World Health Organization has pointed out that health equity won’t be achieved until everyone can attain their full potential for health and well-being. Populations that are disadvantaged by their social-economic status, geographic location, or environment are still exposed to many preventable differences in the burden of disease. “I hope that this conference challenges and inspires us to do more to advance health equity around the world,” said Mellissa Wither, APRU’s Global Health Program Director and Associate Professor of Clinical Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. “Our collective work in global health research, practice, and education can promote values of mutual respect and cooperation.” Mellissa Wither, APRU’s Global Health Program Director   The 2023 Conference consisted of twelve panels in which participants discussed on issues ranging from delivering accessible and culturally sensitive healthcare, to migrant workers in Singapore, to the prevalence of neural tube defects in Latin America, and the impact of fortification. Although many of the topics were based on local specifics, the presenters’ viewpoints were typically applicable to the whole of the Asia-Pacific. Matire Harwood, Head of Department of General Practice and Primary Healthcare at the University of Auckland , shared insights based on her experience of being a general practitioner and family physician at a Maori-led health clinic in South Auckland. The consequences of health disparities related to migration, and the effects of inequality on the health of indigenous populations. “Understanding ethnic inequities requires a focus on the systems that create and sustain them, because that is the common factor across different countries, not indigenous peoples’ genes or behaviours,” Harwood said. “As health leaders, we have a responsibility to ensure that nations monitor, and not accept, health inequities for indigenous peoples.” Matire Harwood, Head of Department of the University of Auckland School of Population Health   The results of the APRU Global Health Virtual Case Competition and Student Poster Contest 2023 were announced during the conference.  Download the Program Book of the 16th APRU Global Health Conference 2023 for more details. The 17th APRU Global Health Conference will be hosted by Chulalongkorn University’s School of Global Health in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2024.

Original Post on News – Department of Population and Public Health Sciences / University of Southern California   This fall marks 10 years since Mellissa Withers, PhD, MHS, began serving as the Director of the Global Health Program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), a consortium of 60 international universities. This network provides students a chance to deep dive into prevailing global health challenges while learning from their peers living across several countries shaped by different cultures, perspectives, and experiences. “While it’s important for our students to learn the theory and frameworks of global health presented in textbooks and learned in the classroom, being able to actually go out and apply it through experiential learning is a beneficial opportunity that is really important for our students,” explains Withers, who also serves as an associate professor and the director of pedagogical enrichment and training in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at Keck School of Medicine of USC. The APRU was founded in 1997 by the presidents of four Californian universities who wanted to build multidisciplinary collaborations across the pacific. In 2007, USC established a new program in global health which became its largest program, focusing on the students, education and training. “I am fortunate that the USC Office of the Provost has continued to support my position in this role to expand our global health initiatives,” says Withers. During her tenure, Withers has developed several vibrant initiatives including joint courses which have run for the past nine years. Every fall, she leads a course called ‘Global Health Leadership in the Real World’ bringing together five to seven universities. This semester, students from China, Thailand, Singapore, Mexico, and USC, simultaneously logged in from different time zones for two hours every week, over a ten-week period. The first half of the class featured a renowned global health guest speaker, who imparted their varied expertise and experiences in the field. Past speakers included the Former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Former Associate Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), and a former Minister of Health from Costa Rica. In the second half of each class, students dissected case studies with instructors working in small groups representative of the five countries in attendance, to exchange ideas and debate global health concepts. “In Global Health we talk a lot about the importance of interdisciplinary solutions and collaborations, but it’s not too often that you see so many disciplines, countries and economies represented in one activity, training program or conference,” she reports.  Another ongoing class following a similar model is a course in ‘Global Health Ethics,’ bringing together students from Ecuador, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Mexico, the Philippines and the U.S. The student body is not only diverse in terms of location, but also features various college majors including medicine, pharmacy, law, anthropology, engineering, and art. “The representation of a wide range of disciplines is really critical to prepare the next cohort of global health leaders,” she affirms. “Since these courses were well received, with high demand and limited space, we decided to develop other key initiatives to engage students,” she reveals. This led to the creation of the ‘Global Health Student Poster Contest’ held concurrently at the APRU Annual Conference. A highlight of this contest is that all the student’s posters are accepted and displayed, giving them an opportunity to showcase their work at an international scientific conference. “This helps to break down some equity barriers for students who cannot afford to fly or participate in international trips,” she indicates. This year’s conference will be held in Latin America for the first time. Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to submit their posters which are judged by committee members. This month, eight students from USC’s programs in global medicine, public health, and global health have received funding from the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences and Pearson to attend the conference in Mexico City. There, they will present their work or serve as moderators. A recent graduate from the Master of Public Health program, Brooke Edwards, MPH, has been selected as a finalist for her poster on physical therapy among liver transplant patients. Another initiative Withers oversees is the ‘Annual Virtual Global Health Case Competition,’ where the winning team receives $1,000. In the past, the competition hosted 40-50 teams, but this year it attracted 100 teams from over 20 countries. This year, the APRU partnered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to create a challenge addressing the needs of migrants and refugees in urban settings and health care. Teams of three to six students were given 12 weeks to create a proposal to address the challenge. Past challenges included topics around tobacco control, mental health, disaster preparedness, using social media to promote exercise, and addressing the infodemic. There are many opportunities for students to develop their skillset in global health at USC. “I hope our students walk away from these experiences with a deeper understanding of cross-cultural competencies, feeling like global citizens, with greater confidence, effective communication, and leadership skills,” she concludes.

Photo source: APEC News APRU congratulates Dr. Jason Junjie Huang, the winner of the 2023 APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize at the 2023 APEC Women and the Economy Forum in Seattle in August. Dr. Huang is the Deputy Director and Research Assistant Professor at the Centre for Health Education and Health Promotion (CHEHP) of APRU member the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His study, in collaboration with the APRU Global Health Program’s Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) Working Group, investigated the global burden of endometrial cancer, one of the most common cancers affecting women. Finding that many of the risk factors that contribute to endometrial cancer are lifestyle choices, Dr. Huang stressed that education campaigns are a critical tool for raising awareness of the modifiable risk factors to endometrial cancer. APRU’s strong representation in the realm of outstanding research work for women’s health was additionally manifested by Weiyu Zhou, a student in the School of Public Health of APRU member Fudan University, being one of the two runners-up. Zhou’s research underscored the importance of education campaigns to protect against preventable disease that affects working-age women. Her study investigated a new pilot program on HPV immunization involving mothers and girls aged 9-14 in Shanghai. Zhou illustrated that when economies invest in education campaigns to increase parental HPV-related knowledge, the uptake of vaccination among girls increases. Launched in 2018, the Healthy Women Healthy Economies Prize supports outstanding research work that will provide policymakers and business leaders with the tools they need to implement measures that improve women’s health and well-being, so that they can join, rise, and thrive in the workforce. Thanks to Mellissa Withers, Director of the APRU Global Health Program, who served as a judge of the Prize. The winning researcher receives USD 20,000 and the two runners-up receive USD 5,000 each.

Original post on USC Global. While climate change remains a pressing issue across countries and generations, research shows the topic is of particular concern to millennials and Gen Z, according to Pew. That is part of the reason why the Student Global Climate Change Simulation has drawn such immense interest from the USC student body. It’s also a challenging, thought-provoking way to learn more about the worldwide effects of climate change. The event, hosted in partnership with the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), saw almost 200 students from 22 universities around the globe participating in an online mock United Nations climate change conference. Students formed delegations that worked together to negotiate policies, sign pledges related to carbon emission caps and other climate change solutions, and more.  Top experts from the UN, World Business Council for Sustainable Development and other esteemed organizations also spoke at the simulation on issues such as climate refugees, reforestation and ocean health. This year, the simulation was led in part by Mellissa Withers, director of the APRU Global Health Program at USC and associate professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and Shannon Gibson, associate professor of environmental studies, political science and international relations at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.  Gibson first became interested in working on the APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation years ago, when she experienced an earlier iteration at a summit. She incorporated it into her own classroom, and later, with the help of Withers, “took the model and really expanded it.” “I think as an educator, one of the things that you become aware of is that students learn by doing. They learn by putting themselves in the shoes of a decision-maker. By taking a student who may only have a perspective of the United States when it comes to climate change, having them function as China, or the Philippines, or South Africa really helps them to learn how the thinking varies,” she told USC Global.  Preparing for Careers in Global Health The mock exercise ran for three days total — April 11, April 18 and April 25 — and drew students from multiple schools and disciplines within USC, including public health, computer science, business, international relations, environmental studies, global studies, occupational therapy and engineering. Giancarlo Ceja, an international relations and environmental studies undergraduate student, hopes the simulation will impact his future career in environmental policy, using his education to help those living in countries most affected by climate change. “In terms of environmental justice, I grew up in a very low-income, marginalized community in Southern California. My parents immigrated from a rural community in Mexico, and both are being affected in different ways by climate change. Marginalized, low-income communities around the world are most vulnerable to the brunt of the effects of climate change, and I want to help fix that,” he explained. Ceja is also optimistic his fellow participants will end the mock conference more aware of how much work is yet to be done, especially by the world’s most powerful countries. While everyone has a role in combating climate change, some nations — specifically developed countries that have produced the most carbon emissions — have a higher responsibility to contribute to the fight against climate change, he said. “Coming together in the international community and holding up to the commitments that you make is really important. Solving this problem is impossible without international cooperation,” explained Ceja, citing the UN’s common but differentiated responsibilities principle. Like Ceja, environmental science and public health undergraduate student Abeerah Siddiqui was inspired to participate in the simulation to gain a new, universal outlook on today’s critical climate change challenges. “We all have this collective interest in combating climate change, so this way, we can get a more global perspective on the issue. I think oftentimes, as students here, we’re a lot more familiar with how the U.S. handles [climate change]. We’re learning how our local communities are addressing the issues, but not so much how other countries and other parts of the world are tackling it,” she explained. With an aspiring career in public health, Siddiqui believes the mock negotiations will allow her to further grasp international health care systems and policies, as well as come up with public health solutions that prioritize regional perspectives. “The skills and knowledge I take away from this will help me [prepare] when it comes time for me to potentially visit other countries,” Siddiqui said. Multi-Discipline Simulation Promoting a cross-industry response to climate change, the simulation also included Master of Business Administration (MBA) student Kayla Friedman-Barb, who is looking to enhance her education in clean and renewable solutions to pivot to the sustainability sector following graduation. “Understanding other people’s perspectives is a huge part of business and [how we operate],” she said. “We need to understand how other countries think about climate change and what they see as the best ways to combat it, working together in order to have a truly collaborative solution.” Friedman-Barb was particularly eager to learn from students who are based outside of the U.S., as the international negotiations would highlight what the U.S. and other countries are “willing to give up” or refuse to mediate in their respective commitments to tackling climate change. “What’s important for each community and each person will become apparent, especially in younger generations who are participating in this program,” Friedman-Barb explained. For Gibson, these students have perfectly articulated what she hopes they will take away from the process: an effective, international approach to protecting our shared planet. Even if climate change is not a topic brimming with optimism, it’s a crucial one that will directly impact each and every participant — and Gibson is hopeful some students will go on to directly influence the fight against climate change. “Sometimes, I wish it were a bit more hopeful, but it does show them climate mitigation is a political process,” Gibson said. “It’s not just a scientific problem. It is very much a political, social and economic issue, as well as a cultural problem. You need that interdisciplinary approach to understand how to solve this massive problem.”  Learn more about APRU and USC’s Department of Population and Public Health Sciences today. Find out more about the Climate Change Simulation here. 

Original post on Around the O. The University of Oregon is co-hosting the Student Global Climate Change Simulation sponsored by the Association of Pacific Rim Universities. The APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation is a role-playing exercise in which students will form multicountry, multidisciplinary teams to play the role of delegates to the UN climate change negotiations. Twenty-two universities from around the Pacific Rim are taking part in the exercise, which runs April 11-25. Over three sessions, an online simulation activity will use materials from the World Climate Interactive and the C-ROADS simulation model developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The live sessions will be supplemented with short lectures and other materials developed and curated by the APRU experts, which will be available on a shared Canvas website. To learn more, visit the World Climate Simulation. The APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation is co-organized by the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Program housed at the UO and the APRU Global Health Program housed at University of Southern California. Partner universities include Fiji National University, Keio University, Korea University, Monash University, Nagoya University, Nanyang Technological University, National Taiwan University, National University of Singapore, Peking University, Tecnológico de Monterrey, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, The University of Auckland, The University of Melbourne, The University of Sydney, Tohoku University, Universidad de los Andes, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Universiti Malaya and University of Hawaii. Find out more about the Climate Change Simulation 2023 here. 

Universities of APRU showcased the APRU Virtual Student Exchange Program, the APRU SDG Education for Global Citizenship Program, and the APRU UN Climate Change Simulation at the APAIE (Asia-Pacific Association for International Education) 2023 Conference. Held March 13-17, 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand, and with more than 2,700 delegates from 61 countries/ regions, the APAIE 2023 Conference was an effective platform for supporting member universities and highlighting APRU’s collective impact.   The APAIE 2023’s APRU panel, which was chaired by APRU Director, Network Management, Jackie Wong, explored collaborative ideas and frameworks to develop partnerships that support international programs that are inclusive, integrative, and innovative. The panel drew on the experiences of universities including APRU members in working together to provide unique student experiences in virtual environments. Panelists included Ms Shally Fan, Director of Academic Links, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Dr Ram Piyaket, Director, Office of International Affairs and Global Network, Chulalongkorn University, and Dr Mellissa Withers, Associate Professor, University of Southern California. Chulalongkorn University, a supporting university of APAIE 2023, also hosted the panel titled, “Co-designing SDG programs for Sustainable Futures—Challenges and Opportunities” chaired by Michiko Yoshida, Director of Chulalongkorn University’s Global Networking and Engagement Division and featuring panellists: Ruhimat Soerakoesoemah, UN ESCAP’s Head of the Subregional Office for South-East Asia; Ronnakorn Vaiyavuth, Lecturer at Chulalongkorn University’s School of Integrated Innovation; and Paola Ardiles Gamboa, Senior Lecturer at Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Health Sciences. Joined by experienced multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners, the panel discussed the value of co-designing the APRU SDG Education for Global Citizenship program. Yoshida said, “Shaping sustainable futures requires co-creating knowledge, and as educators, we have an opportunity to ensure borderless and innovative education in the Asia-Pacific through practices that are equitable, inclusive, and reflect the diversity of our region.” The collaborative implementation of the APRU SDG Education for Global Citizenship program is a prime example of how partners can reach our sustainable and educational aspirations. “We are thankful for this exchange on virtual programs that can shape our collective impact as a network,” said Wong. “It was a great opportunity for us to highlight the value of international collaboration and multi-sectoral engagement among universities and with the international community in addressing global challenges,” she added. The Asia-Pacific Association for International Education (APAIE) is committed to promoting the value of international education within the Asia-Pacific region, enabling greater cooperation between institutions, and enriching and supporting international programs, activities, and exchanges. More than 2,700 delegates from 61 countries/ regions attended the APAIE 2023, translating into ample opportunities to expand their networks. APRU looks forward to the APAIE 2024 in Perth in March next year.

APRU recently completed its second APRU Climate Change Simulation and is now preparing for next year’s simulation, with a new advisory group soon to be appointed. Co-organized by the APRU Global Health and the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Programs, the APRU Climate Change Simulation is a role-playing exercise in which students form multi-country, multi-disciplinary teams play the role of delegates to the UN Climate Change Negotiations. The 2022 APRU Climate Change Simulation engaged nearly 170 students from 17 APRU Universities in addition to a student group from Fiji National University. Forty-five experts from APRU universities and external partner organizations supported the delivery of the simulations, which are tasked to show ways to limit global warming to well below 2℃ in line with The Paris Agreement. A post-event survey showed that participating students highly appreciated the amount of diverse information on climate change, interaction with people from different parts of the world and the chance to take a very close look at the problems facing each country. “This simulation exercise has brought me to look at climate change in various perspectives in terms of its causes and the possible mitigation actions that are scientifically proven,” said Pedros Marcol Tabulo, a student from Fiji National University. “I will be so happy to share with my family and friends the importance of managing forests, which involves reducing deforestation and stepping up afforestation efforts,” he added. Students have also been grateful for the input they get from the experts who contribute to the simulations. The 2022 APRU Climate Change Simulation saw Ebru Gencoglu, Head of Sustainable Sourcing of Adidas, sharing insights on Adida’s efforts to lower the carbon footprint with new design and production approaches. Bernhard Barth, Human Settlements Officer of UN-Habitat, described how the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing conflicts both reveal and amplify the escalating impacts of climate change. Important expert contributions were provided by Dr. Rhys Jones (Ngāti Kahungunu), the Public Health Physician and Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland, and Dr. Ralph Chami, the Assistant Director, and Chief of Financial Policies at the International Monetary Fund. Their key insights focused on indigenous perspectives and how to fund the climate crisis respectively. On the facilitator side, the post-event survey showed that the participators of the 2022 APRU Climate Change Simulation were impressed by how close it got to actual negotiations. Facilitators also noted that the students were very motivated despite the event being held online. “The value of this type of experience for students is magnificent, as it allows students to appreciate the values of a wide range of intellectual disciplines and a high degree of intercultural sensitivity, tolerance and a global perspective,” said Vivian Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who served as a facilitator. The 2023 APRU Climate Change Simulation will tentatively run in April 2023. The advisory group will be made up of simulation founding members Mellissa Withers of the University of Southern California and Elly Vandegrift of the University of Oregon. They will be joined by facilitators Vivian Lee, Zhenyu Zhang of Peking University and Christina Schönleber and Tina Lin of the APRU Secretariat. “We urge any interested APRU members who want to get their students engaged in this important activity to reach out to us,” Zhang said. “It is an excellent opportunity for participants to improve their communication skills, which is important when negotiating, lobbying or influencing leaders to take the actions necessary to implement solutions to climate change,” he added. More Information Find the webpage of the Student Global Climate Change Simulation 2022 here. View the program of the simulation 2022 here. Read the news in The Fiji Times about the simulation here. View a blog from UO’s student reporter here. To find out more about the APRU Climate Change Simulation 2023 and how your students can engage please contact [email protected].

The 7th APRU Global Health Virtual Case Competition 2022 recently concluded, giving a total of 48 teams across 22 universities in 12 economies a platform to present solutions for the challenges the health system of Fiji has been facing. The competing teams had up to 10 weeks to prepare a 10-minute video in English to address a complex hypothetical scenario, for which there is no single “right” plan. Fiji has had 64,221 cases and 834 deaths due to COVID as of March 21, 2022. Despite a relatively successful response to COVID-19, the financial cost to Fiji’s economy has been devastating. In 2019, Fiji’s tourism brought in US$1.3 billion, but passenger arrivals plummeted by 84% in 2020, causing tourism to generate only US$236 million. This dramatic drop illustrates that extended quarantine and lockdown measures are not feasible for highly tourism-dependent countries. The APRU Global Health Virtual Case Competition 2022’s winning team was Fiji Apple from National University of Singapore. The decision, which came along with a prize of US$1,000, was made by an international panel of 16 judges, experts and participants of the Sustainable Cities and Landscape Conference 2022. Fiji Apple’s three-pronged solution consists of FijiReadi!, which strives to improve Fiji’s future pandemic preparedness and response via the use of a bottom-up approach; FijiUniti!, which improves communication between villages and higher administrative units; and FijiXchange!, which is a material goods exchange system to secure essential supplies. “It important for us to consider Fiji’s culture and practices in suggesting solutions that favor local level governance rather than national level ones,” Fiji Apple says in its winning video. “We thus identified the need to promote a bottom-up approach to pandemic detection and response that empowers people living in both urban and rural areas,” they add. Although this challenge was hypothetical, many economies around the world are currently considering how to address identical issues. For more information about the case competition 2022, visit here.

Recently, the “Global Health Virtual Case Competition 2022” hosted by the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) proceeded to its final stage. Team “Arete” from Tongji University advanced to the top 10 of the competition, receiving the great honor of being the only team from China’s mainland in the final this year. Six Tongji University students, namely WANG Kaitao, MIAO Yongen, YAN Le and LIU Tong from School of Medicine (TUSM), and CHEN Yixian and PAN Kunwei from the School of Foreign Languages, made up the “Arete” team. The internationally and annually APRU-hosted Global Health Virtual Case Competition has provided APRU students with an opportunity to practice critical thinking and problem-solving skills through cases and scenarios to help solve global health challenges. The challenge of the case competition 2022 was to build and strengthen the capacity of the health systems in Fiji to better respond to future public health threats, focusing on vulnerable populations. The participating teams were obliged to propose a realistic, well-designed, and innovative solution. A total of 48 teams from 12 major Pacific Rim economies participated in the case competition 2022. Three Tongji University teams (Arete, Tongji Youth Team, Small Jin), made up of twelve students from TUSM (Clinical Medicine, Nursing and Physical Therapy) and four students from other majors (SFL, CAUP, CEIE), registered for the challenging competition to compete against other teams from top leading research universities around the Pacific Rim. By the time these participating teams started to prepare for their entries, they had been confronted with various difficulties and challenges such as stringent containment measures during the worst period of the COVID outbreak in Shanghai, despite which they still managed to do a literature search, completed interview schedules with Fijian students and local transportation workers, conducted liaison meetings on a regular basis, and worked out a wrap-up of the case solution through video shooting and editing. Through uninterrupted efforts in balancing online learning and a non-stop fight against COVID, they completed their proposal on schedule. During that period, they received intensified concerns and support, including guidance from CHEN haibin, Deputy Party Chief of TUSM, who shared the first-hand experience of pandemic prevention and control on West Campus. The International Students Office of Tongji University assisted in contacting Fijian students whilst the School of Design and Innovation, along with the Sino-Italian Institute, gave support for video-making. The Association of Pacific Rim Universities, or APRU, set up in 1997, is a consortium of top leading research universities from various economies of the Pacific Rim. Currently, it has a membership of 60 top research universities around the world, among which 12 universities are from China’s mainland, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Fudan University, Nanjing University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology, Sun Yat-sen University and Tongji University. Tongji University has been taking an active part in consortium activities with its commitment to promoting cultural integration and resource sharing, close-knit and deep-rooted partnerships, and further development of an inclusive and efficient platform for international collaboration. View the Chinese version here. Find out more about the Global Health Virtual Case Competition 2022 here.

Original The Fiji Times Twelve students from the Fiji National University’s (FNU) College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences (CMNHS) were part of the Climate Change Simulation Conference in collaboration with the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU). APRU is a non-profit network of about 60 universities in the Asia-Pacific, with the Secretariat based in Hong Kong. This activity is organized by the APRU Global Health Programme at University of Southern California (US) and the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Program at University of Oregon (US). The APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation is a role-playing exercise in which students will form multi-country, multidisciplinary teams to play the role of delegates to the UN Climate Change Negotiations. CMNHS Acting Dean, Dr Donald Wilson, said the conference allowed the students to participate and learn with the students from different countries on Climate Change. “The global engagement of our students links well with the strategic goal of the university for student experience and also creates an awareness for our students and staff of the international instruments that are critical to demonstrating the importance of staying connected to the global changes in climate,” Dr Wilson said. “We look forward to more conferences where our students can be part of and contribute towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13 to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.” The aim of the conference was to describe what contributes to climate change, explain global climate change efforts, such as the Paris Agreement, the UNCCC and the COP, identify adaptation and mitigation strategies and which will have the most impact on global temperatures, explain how/why climate change affects the most vulnerable populations and why it is an issue of social justice. The conference also discussed the practice of global teamwork and cross-cultural collaboration and communication skills, the complexity involved in countries’ decisions, including consideration of factors such as economic impact, negotiating power and the challenges of negotiations among countries on issues such as climate change and the importance of global collaboration. The CMNHS Head of the School of Public Health and Primary Care (SPHPC), Dr Timaima Tuiketei said the University was grateful to be part of the conference. “We are happy to be part of a global initiative to build the capacities of our students and future leaders in addressing Climate Change. At the same time, the SPHPC is committed to strengthening its Climate Change and Health Programme to the overall university contribution to the national and regional Climate Change Agenda,” she said. Third year Public Health student, Margaret Biliki said she became more knowledgeable after attending the conference. “I am privileged to be joining my fellow colleagues for the APRU Simulation on Climate Change this year as an FNU rep, as Climate change is a global issue affecting our environment and our health,” she said. “I am enthusiastic to be learning from a group of diverse disciplines and experts from across the globe in interactive and informative zoom sessions and discussions on causes, effects, and solutions to address climate change issues. “The event will also help me to learn negotiation skills and to enhance my knowledge on climate change issues, a critically important issue for us, as Pacific Islanders. I am looking forward to learning and interacting with students from other universities as well.” The conference had Guest Speakers who spoke on coastal habitats, deforestation, clean energy, trading and offsets, and diplomacy and negotiation skills.   Find out more about the Student Climate Change Simulation here.

The annual APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize is now accepting applications for outstanding research work that strives to improve women’s health and economic well-being, and charts the way for more inclusive growth. The winning entry will receive USD 20,000 and the two runners-up will receive USD 5,000 each. The prize, first launched during APEC 2019 in Chile with the support of Merck, aims to encourage the development and usage of sex-disaggregated data and promote gender-based research within APEC. As women across the world were hit especially hard during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly those who serve as unpaid caregivers, more research is needed to support solutions and advancements that allow women to stay in the workforce as the world rebounds. “We know that women in the region are overrepresented in industries hit hard by the pandemic—food, services, hospitality and tourism, to name a few,” said Renee Graham, the Chair of APEC Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy. “While our focus is to narrow disparity and improve women’s economic participation, we must also ensure that we pay attention to women’s health, safety and well-being.” Thailand, host economy of APEC 2022, is prioritizing inequality and imbalance this year by integrating inclusivity and sustainability objectives in tandem with economic goals. “To ensure an inclusive recovery from COVID-19, which has disproportionately impacted women and girls, we must implement evidence-based, gender-sensitive policies,” said Kannika Charoenluk of Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. “Original research, backed by data and evidence, will be crucial in ensuring a gender-intentional recovery and future growth model.” Since its inception in 2015, the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies initiative has improved women’s health through public-private partnerships. One key outcome has been the cross-sector collaboration in creating a policy toolkit—a compendium of the issues, actions, and implementing elements for improving women’s health across five areas. The areas are: workplace health and safety; health awareness and access; sexual and reproductive health; gender-based violence; and work-life balance. Applicants to the 2022 APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize can be individuals or teams, with the stipulation that one official participant must represent an APEC member economy. Applicants do not need to come from academia, as long as the research is evidence-based and addresses at least one of the pillars outlined in the Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Policy Toolkit. The prize winner may choose to present their research to APEC gender experts in the public and private sectors on the margins of the 2022 APEC Women and the Economy Forum, hosted by Thailand. “Now more than ever, we need to promote research that supports our collective effort in alleviating the economic burdens women face in the workforce,” said Hong Chow, Executive Vice President and Head of China and International of Merck Healthcare. “By using science, we can provide evidence-based information to policymakers and business leaders so that the right measures get implemented to improve women’s health so women can join and rise in the workforce,” she concluded. Interested candidates may access the prize application form through this link. The application deadline is Tuesday, 31 May 2022. For more information, please visit the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies website or contact [email protected] with any questions.   For further details, please contact: Masyitha Baziad +65 9751 2146 at [email protected] Michael Chapnick +65 9647 4847 [email protected]

The APRU Global Health Conference 2021 was held virtually on November 16-18, hosted by the School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong. The event, which took three years of preparation due to the pandemic, focused on global urban health and featured the announcements of the student winners of the APRU Virtual Global Health Case Competition and the Global Health Student Poster Contest. Urbanization and expansion of cities are inexorable global trends. Over 55% of the world’s population now lives in urban cities, and this proportion is expected to increase to 66% by 2050. The health consequences of such population changes are increasingly recognized as a key issues for sustainable human development. Cities present opportunities and challenges, which holds the key to citizens’ health and well-being. “Cross-sectoral partnerships offer the chance to develop integrated responses connecting environment and health,” said Gabrielle Fitzgerald, the founder and CEO of US-based Panorama, a platform for visionary leaders to develop solutions and bold action for social change, in a keynote speech. “How we catalyze the coalition in a fluid system is the key to address global challenges,” she added. Keynotes and plenary speakers shared insights on the built environment and its effects on human well-being under climate change and rapid urbanization. The panels’ topics ranged from mental health among adolescents to digital technologies and from health risk behaviour to active lifestyles. The APRU Virtual Global Health Case Competition 2021 awarded the winning prize to the short-listed teams at the conference. Participating teams were challenged young talents to develop technology-driven solutions to the COVID-19 Infodemic. There is a pressing need to address the massive amount of misinformation that has quickly spread throughout the world during the pandemic, with dramatic negative personal and societal consequences. This year the competition was conceived and hosted by the APRU Global Health Program in partnership with Amazon Web Services. ‘Amazon and AWS have made an upskilling commitment, to make it easier for people to have access to the skills they need to grow their careers. The APRU Global Health Case Competition encourages young talents and future leaders to address global challenges with technologies mindful of social impact, equity of access and equality to learning. This synchronises perfectly with AWS’ commitment.’ said by Dr. Julian Sham, Head of Health Business, Asia Pacific & Japan, AWS. 121 teams from 37 universities in 17 economies submitted the entries this year. The winning team is ​UP Mediasina, a team of six medical students from the University of the Philippines, who were awarded US$1,000. The two runners-up are from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Nanyang Technological University. “Although the Philippines is the social media capital of the world with 89 million active users, it lacks a dedicated information crisis response,” the UP Mediasina team said in their video introducing their Project Dinig for systemized communication strategies. “The Philippines is facing a perfect storm and our health system is under crisis, but it need not be for long, as Filipinos could benefit from social listening facilitated by Project Dinig,” they added. The global health poster contest, for its part, invited current undergraduate and graduate students to submit their works related to global health research and studies to enter the competition. The contest received 64 submissions from 27 universities across 12 economies. The winning teams of the undergraduate category and graduate category are from the University of Santo Tomas and The University of Hong Kong respectively. The two winners were each awarded US$500. Find out more about the conference and the student case competition here.

In time for the upcoming COP26 meetings, 120 dedicated APRU students from across the Asia Pacific region and close on 40 expert speakers and facilitators from within and outside the APRU network contributed to and concluded the first APRU Climate Change Simulation. The 3-session is a role-playing exercise in which students formed multi-country, multi-disciplinary teams to slip intothe roles of delegates to the UN Climate Change Negotiations. The APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation uses materials from Climate Interactive and the EN-ROADS simulation model developed by MIT. Live sessions and breakout room-discussions were supplemented with keynote presentations by experts from the IMF, adidas, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, short lectures from key experts across the network and other materials developed and curated by the APRU expert team. On the long list of intriguing topics were indigenous knowledge, planetary health, public health, coastal habitats, deforestation, clean energy, trading and offsets, as well as diplomacy and negotiation skills. APRU envisions the event to be the first of many activities to develop a network of committed citizens who tackle climate change head-on. “The opportunity to work across different disciplines, places and perspectives as part of this negotiation simulation wasa rare chance for students to learn about the complexities of developing solutions to urgent global challenges, the largest of which is climate change,” said Kathryn Bowen, Deputy Director of Melbourne Climate Future, University of Melbourne. Kristie Ebi, Professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, University of Washington, also one of the sixteen participating APRU experts actively facilitating the negotiations and discussions, added that “the APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation represented a call to taking collective action against global warming.” The APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation was co-organized by the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Program housed at the University of Oregon and the APRU Global Health Program housed at the University of Southern California. External partners include Adidas, Rebalance Earth, Smart Energy Connect-CLP, Tuvalu Mo Te Atua, UN Habitat and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The participating students gave their thumbs up. For instance, Annette Benger, who studies Masters of Environment at Melbourne University, shared that the event has taken her understanding to the next level. “In my lectures on Sustainability and Behaviour Change, we are discussing the role of selfishness and altruism in human nature,” Benger said. “It is so easy to see so much selfishness, until you come across something like this, and we are all planning to keep in touch in our WhatsApp group,” she added.   The APRU Student Global Climate Change Simulation also impressed its facilitators, with Tze Kwan, Research Associate, Centre for Nature-based Climate Solutions, National University of Singapore, labelling the event “super”successful. “I am honoured to be part of this and to have had the opportunity to share my interests with the participants,” Kwan said. “This event was such a valuable learning opportunity, making me hope more students will get to attend and be inspired to act in face of climate change,” she added. The APRU Partner Universities involved in the Student Global Climate Change Simulation are Monash University, Nanyang Technological University, Peking University, Tecnológico de Monterrey, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, The University of Auckland, The University of Melbourne, Tohoku University, Universidad San Francisco De Quito, Universiti Malaya, and University of Washington. Find out a featured article from University of Southern California, here. Find out a post-activity report from University of Oregon here. Read students’ feedback from a CUHK article here.

A 12-session virtual workshop series developed jointly by the APRU Global Health Program’s Global Health Education and Technology Working Group at the University of Southern California and the Global STEM Education Program at the University of Oregon has grown into an effective platform providing important support for higher education staff, cushioning the impact of COVID-19. The creation of a peer-to-peer learning platform to exchange ways and knowledge on teaching in virtual environments became a pressing issue, as the pandemic forced the academic community to move fully to online teaching. Launched in August 2020 and scheduled to run until June 2021, the APRU Teaching in Virtual Environments Webinar Series addresses everyday educational problems, such as how do adjust safeguards for course exams. Underlining the series’ significance, it will be highlighted as a case study in a publication expected to be published later this year by the Spring Nature. “We designed these sessions to respond to the immediate need of providing remote teaching resources to faculty within the APRU network, and they have surpassed all of my expectations with a truly global faculty community,” said Elly Vandegrift, program director for Global Science Education Initiatives in the Division of Global Engagement at the University of Oregon. “Our work together strengthens and builds resiliency within our global higher education community to respond to future educational challenges,” Vandegrift adds. The APRU webinar series, moderated and led by Prof Vandegrift are conducted in 90-minute sessions and structured around specific faculty experts sharing their evidence-based practices that they adopted to online teaching. In the webinars’ breakout rooms, participants from different regions with different technology infrastructure share how they overcome the respective challenges. In conclusion the webinars return to a full group discussion to share insights learned and best practices shared across the diverse group. “We have collectively learned how many similar challenges students and faculty have faced during the pandemic and together explored ways to adapt global solutions to our local teaching and learning contexts,” highlights Mellissa Withers, program director APRU Global Health Program at the University of Southern California. The webinars support and complement other APRU Global Health Program events. The seven sessions that have been held so far involved participants from 92 institutes representing 19 economies. For upcoming webinars in this series visit https://apru.org/our-work/pacific-rim-challenges/global-health/

Issued by the Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy Announced during the APEC Women and the Economy Forum on September 24, 2021, the winner and two runners-up for the 2021 APEC Healthy Women Healthy Economies Research Prize are listed here. The winning team is co-authored by Mr. Chen-Wei Hsiang, PhD student at University College London; Dr. Ming-Jen Lin, Distinguished Professor of Economics at National Taiwan University; Dr. Kuan-Ming Chen, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the United States’ National Bureau of Economic Research. Runner-up: Dr. Ying Yang, Associate Professor at China’s National Institute for Family Planning Runner-up: Ms. Nurliyana Binte Daros, Lecturer at Nanyang Technological University Find out the news release here and more information about the prize below. Applications are now open for the 2021 APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize. The prize rewards researchers who spur the creation of sex-disaggregated data and gender-based research in APEC. Launched in 2018 by President Sebastián Piñera of Chile with the support of Merck, the research prize seek for outstanding research work that will provide policymakers and business leaders with the tools they need to implement measures that improve women’s health and well-being so women can join, rise and thrive in the workforce. “Robust data and evidence are the foundation of sound policymaking,” said Renee Graham, New Zealand’s Secretary for Women and Chair of APEC’s Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy. “The gendered impacts of COVID-19 make the call for data and evidence all the more important, as we look to ensure women are fully incorporated into, and benefit from, the economic recovery from the pandemic.” Last year, the inaugural research prize was awarded to Dr Fanghui Zhao, a director at the National Cancer Center and Cancer Hospital with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, whose winning research looks at ways to make cervical cancer prevention more accessible and affordable for people in lower-middle income economies. Dr Lih Rong Wang of Chinese Taipei and Dr Dorothy Chan of Hong Kong, China were the two runners-up for the 2020 prize. Applicants to the 2021 APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize can be individuals or teams with one leader listed as official participant from an APEC member economy. Applications for the 2021 research prize are due on 31 May 2020. Applicants do not need to come from academia, as long as the research is evidence-based and addresses at least one of the pillars outlined in the Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Policy Toolkit, such as: workplace health and safety health awareness and access sexual and reproductive health gender-based violence work/life balance The prize winner will receive USD 20,000 and have the opportunity to present the research to APEC gender experts in the public and private sectors on the margins of the 2021 Women and the Economy Forum, hosted by New Zealand. Two runners-up will receive USD 5,000 each. “COVID-19 has exacerbated gender inequalities across a range of women’s health issues, making sex-disaggregated data and gender-based research essential for today’s policymakers,” said Liz Henderson,Regional Vice President, Merck Biopharma Asia Pacific. “To truly unlock the economic potential of women, we must first empower women by promoting policies that improve their health outcomes.” “It is important to make available sex-segregated data, especially in the services sector where women’s participation is high and which have been affected by the pandemic,” explained Dr Rebecca Sta Maria, Executive Director of the APEC Secretariat. “Good sex-segregated data will contribute to the development of policies that are effective, equitable and beneficial.” Since established in 2015 the Healthy Women, Healthy Economies initiative aims to identify and implement policies that advance women’s health and well-being to support their economic participation. To submit your application form, click here. The deadline to submit applications is 31 May 2020. For more information, please visit the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies website or contact [email protected] with any questions. For further details, please contact: Masyitha Baziad +65 9751 2146 at [email protected] Michael Chapnick +65 9647 4847 at [email protected]

The Asia-Pacific region lags behind other global regions with respect to women’s health and economic participation. Sustainable economic growth cannot be achieved if women, who consist half of the workforce, are unable to fully participate in the economy due to health implications. Since 2014, APEC’s Healthy Women, Healthy Economies (HWHE) initiative convenes government (health, labor, gender officials), private sector, academia and other interested stakeholders to raise awareness and promote good practices to enhance women’s economic participation by improving women’s health. A virtual APEC HWHE Policy Dialogue will be held on March 2, 7:30 – 9:30 p.m. (EST) / March 3, 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. (SGT). A number of high-level speakers from across government, academia, and the private sector will be participating as speakers in the event. The objective of this policy dialogue is to share how public and private stakeholders across the APEC region can ensure women are not left behind, especially given the impact of COVID-19, as well as to identify and discuss the long-term societal risks if we do not build back better. We hope this policy dialogue will help stakeholders – especially those who might not ordinarily consider gender in their line of work – understand why it is vital to construct a COVID-19 recovery effort that takes into consideration the unique ways women have been impacted by the pandemic.

APRU and the University of Sydney on Dec 2 Hong Kong time hosted the webinar Impact of Covid-19 on Women in Higher Education to share the network’s latest research on how the COVID-19 lockdowns across the world have been affecting gender equality in the academic realm. Held under the APRU Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Program (APWiL), the virtual event featured leading researchers discussing the challenges that women face during the lockdown and strategies to overcome barriers to publishing, forging new research partnerships, and establishing funding. The discussion raised important questions about how research outputs are calculated in consideration for tenure and other career milestones. Moderator Professor Katherine Belov, The University of Sydney Professor of Comparative Genomics and Pro Vice-Chancellor Global Engagement, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, raised the curtain with noting that the OECD recently pointed out that women fuel the fight against COVID-19, making up almost 70% of the health care workforce and making them more vulnerable to infection. “At the same time, women are also shouldering much of the burden at home, given school and child care facility closures and longstanding gender inequalities in unpaid work,” Belov said. “And our own colleagues, women in academia, have suffered a similar fate, with research outputs plummeting during lockdown while men’s have increased,” she added. Dr. Bahar Mehmani, Reviewer Experience Lead in the Global STM journals at Elsevier, presented her latest survey illustrating that a wave of academic publications during the pandemic came mainly to the benefit of male researchers’ careers. In Feb-May, the number of publications submitted to Elsevier increased by a whopping 90% compared to the same period of 2019, compelling Mehmani’s team to look at the submitters’ names in order to guess their gender. The data exposed that while submission increased in all months during the lockdown period, the growth of submissions by female researchers accelerated significantly slower than those by male researchers. Growth was even slower in the late stage of female academics’ careers, leading Mehmani to conclude that especially female researchers in middle age bracket are penalized by closures of their children’s schools. According to Mehmani, this is bound to strengthen long-lasting gender inequalities in the academic world; those who have already benefitted from COVID-19 research inflation may have higher chances in future to receive prestigious grants and obtain tenures and promotions in prestigious institutions. “Flagging, carefully pondering or even disregarding COVID-19 related publications and citations from applicants’ assessments must be considered,” Mehmani said. “Institutional interventions, such as promoting a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable working environment and embracing a family friendly leadership policy in the reopening plans of laboratories and institutes, could help moderate the distortions caused by the pandemic,” she added. Mehmani’s presentation was followed by that of Professor Mai-har Sham, Pro-Vice-Chancellor / Vice-President, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Biomedical Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Sham shared her research on the situation in Hong Kong and introduced CUHK’s support measures for female academics who are adversely affected by the pandemic. Professor Kalindi Vora, Director of Feminist Research Institute and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Director of the Feminist Research Institute of UC Davis shared perspectives considering how women and women of color are impacted by Covid-19, with already drastic underrepresentation of women and black women in tenure positions, there are additional strains due to caretaking that widen the gender gap even further. Professor Vora shared important initaitves that the Feminist Research Center is taking to provide support such as Addressing Privilege and Anti-Blackness in Research Culture project and ADQ Scholar and Research Training Series. The Asking Different Questions project is funded by the National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education grant (Co-PIs Sara Giordano, Sarah McCullough, and Kalindi Vora). This project explores the following hypothesis: That changing research questions and research agendas will change who is in STEM and the knowledge we produce. The award will provide graduate students with training to locate their research questions within a larger societal context. This will include how to recognize and address issues of historical bias and cultural complexity. By learning to place their research in a broader context, junior researchers are able to better frame complex research questions, particularly those presented by communities traditionally under-served by science. The curriculum also provides support for interdisciplinary collaborations and the inclusion of diverse voices and approaches in STEM research. Professor Joanna Regulska, Vice provost and Dean of Global Affairs and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, UC Davis reminded participants that there is great potential as part of the APRU network to use our collective knowledge and resources to expand impact in the region. One such opportunitiy is the APRU APWiL Mentoring Program which has just begun its pilot in 2020. More information on the event page For more information about the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership program contact [email protected]

By Jeff Hou See the original post here. This series of articles represents the outcomes of a two-part webinar, titled Bottom-Up Resilience and hosted by APRU Plus in July 2020. Through a partnership between Pacific Rim Community Design Network and the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub, the discussion brought together a group of activists, organizers, and researchers across the region to critically reflect on their ongoing work in supporting the local communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, civil society responses including self-help and mutual aid have become critical to the survival of many individuals and communities, lending a lifeline to some of the most vulnerable populations in our society. In the Seattle area, the ground zero of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, citizen groups and community organizations mobilized to provide food delivery and relief for elderly residents. Makerspaces, architecture firms, and university labs shifted gear to produce Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. Artists volunteered and collaborated with neighborhood organizations to paint murals on boarded-up storefronts to support local businesses and deter vandalism. While many of these efforts may appear to be ad-hoc and spontaneous, others also emerge from longstanding networks and relationships. Together, they represent the emergence of civic resilience — the ability of citizens and communities to cope with and adapt to social, economic, and environmental disturbances. Compared with the common association of resilience with infrastructure projects and scientific analyses, civic resilience suggests the agency and power of individuals and civil society groups in responding to urgent and longstanding challenges. Seattle is far from the only city where such instances exist. Cases of community organizing for self-help and mutual support have also emerged elsewhere during the pandemic, including cities and communities in Asia. Through a two-part webinar titled Bottom-Up Resilience and hosted by APRU Plus in July 2020, a group of activists, organizers, and researchers across the region joined in a dialogue to share lessons and experiences from their ongoing work during the COVID-19 crisis. The webinars set out to examine the following questions: How do communities and social groups self-organize to address challenges during the pandemic, in particular challenges facing the most vulnerable populations in our society? What do these cases have in common? What can we learn from these civil society responses for future planning? What are the roles of researchers, planning and design professionals, and institutions in strengthening community resilience? This essay summarizes the findings and presents the key lesson learned in the hope of advancing the understanding and practices of mutual aid, community self-help, and civic resilience. Pandemic Inequalities With lockdowns, travel restrictions, social distancing requirements, and economic slowdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormously disruptive changes to societies around the world. As schools, streets, and other forms of public and private spaces shut down in one city after another, the patterns of daily lives that were once taken for granted had suddenly unraveled. While a large segment of society can afford or manage to work from home, however, others are not as fortunate. As the death toll under COVID-19 has shown, cities and communities have been impacted differently, with the less privileged ones suffering a greater blow. Inequalities and the experiences of the marginalized and unprivileged were the main themes during the webinar with presenters sharing their first-hand accounts working with or learning from the homeless, migrant workers, and street vendors on the front line during the pandemic. In one case after another, we learned that a simple change in how urban spaces were managed could have a substantial impact on the populations that depended on them for their livelihood. In Manila, for instance, Tessa Maria Guazon of the University of the Philippines Diliman reported on the experience of street vendors during the lockdown, sharing that “many of those who sold their goods on the streets had no earnings having lost touch with their loyal customers.” The street that once provided a “semblance of security” was no longer accessible. The restriction imposed on transportation during the lockdown also “put the marginalized at a greater disadvantage,” said Guazon. Changes in mobility during the lockdowns had a disproportionate impact on different segments of the population. According to Iderlina Mateo-Babiano of the University of Melbourne, 80% of the Philippines population is largely dependent on public transport. Banning mass transit to prevent the spread of COVID-19 had a significant impact on those who rely on public transport. “The impact was felt hardest by the essential workers and frontline workers who still had to go to work but had limited mobility choices,” said Mateo-Babiano. In Hong Kong, homeless individuals, or McRefugees, were locked out of their usual refuge as McDonald’s was closed for a month during the lockdown, according to Michelle Wong, former program manager of Impact HK, a charity organization serving the homeless in Hong Kong. For those who had to report to work, such as the street cleaners, long working hours meant that many did not have time to cue up for buying masks even if they could afford to buy them, said Bernard Lee of Fixing Hong Kong, a volunteer organization that organized donations and distribution of PPEs to street cleaners and those in need during the pandemic. For migrant workers in Hong Kong, Cecilia Chu and Marta Catalán Eraso of the University of Hong Kong reported that “fears of contagion meant that employers were largely unwilling to give domestic workers their weekly time-off.” Specifically, they found 29% of the domestic workers have their days off refused. Foreign domestic workers were also not included in the almost HKD 300 billion government fund to assist industries and the public in Hong Kong. Many also do not have access to PPEs, according to Chu and Catalán Eraso. The situation in Singapore is perhaps most telling in terms of the demographic disparities. According to Tan Beng Kiang of the National University of Singapore, 95% of local cases are migrant workers living in the dormitories. The number of COVID cases is significantly high “because of the high-density living in the sharing of common spaces,” said Tan. Other seemingly simple or trivial changes could also have a significant impact on the less privileged. In Tokyo, according to Mago Yoshihira of YUI Associates, a social enterprise organization serving the homeless population in Sanya, during the pandemic people often eat at home and do not go out to drink (at bars or restaurants), resulting in a lot of household cans to collect. The price of cans went down as a result, with the price for one kilogram falling by almost 50% from 80–85 yen to 45 yen. This falling price presented a challenge for people who make a living by collecting cans. Vulnerable populations during the pandemic include not only the homeless and migrants but also those with chronic illnesses. In Wuhan, the first epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, medical resources were squeezed in the city, and many patients with chronic illnesses had difficulties accessing medical care during the lockdown, according to members of the Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society Yang Bao and Shuyun Cao who have been observing volunteer efforts in Chinese cities during the COVID-19 outbreak. Many of the challenges facing marginalized populations have long existed before the pandemic. In Tokyo, chronically homeless people keep living on the street and refuse to receive social benefits, according to Mago Yoshihira. “One of the major reasons for them to refuse services is that they do not like to stay at the institutional facilities […] Usually the bunk beds are provided, or one room has to be shared with another person. There are also lots of restrictions […] it’s not a good environment,” said Yoshihira. In Taiwan, where the local authority has successfully contained the outbreak of COVID-19, the social isolation and spatial segregation experienced by migrant workers during the pandemic was not new, according to Shu-Mei Huang, an Assistant Professor at the National Taiwan University. From an interview with a community worker, she learned that the migrant workers ”are actually better than anyone to live in isolation, and to maintain online, fragmented social interactions.” Organized Civil Society Responses It was in the context of disparities and inequalities faced by the vulnerable and marginalized populations that many of the self-help and mutual aid efforts emerged. At the webinars, it was interesting to hear about not only the range of efforts but also the organizations that undertook the initiatives. Specifically, it is important to note that many of the organizations existed long before the pandemic. Their efforts showed how they have responded and adapted to changing needs in the community, and how existing networks and relationships played critical roles during the crisis. Starting with Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon shared the effort of her research team as part of the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network, a project that started in 2017. During the pandemic, the team shifted from research to supporting community partners who were mainly homeless women and itinerant vendors. Using social media, the team solicited donations and organized “survival packs” for distribution to community members. Each survival pack provides one family with a week’s supply of rice, cans of sardines and corned beef, powdered coffee and milk, sugar, bread, and fresh vegetables. Multiple organizations from Hong Kong were featured in the webinars. Fixing Hong Kong is a volunteer group based in Tokwawan, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Hong Kong. Founded in 2015 after the Umbrella Movement, the group provides home repair services as a way to perform outreach to communities to promote democracy and community self-help. With the outbreak of COVID-19, the group shifted gear to organize donations and distribution of masks and hand sanitizers to those in need, particularly street cleaners. As of July, the group has received and distributed over 50,000 masks and several hundred liters of hand sanitizers, according to Bernard Lee. ImpactHK is a charity organization focusing on serving the homeless in Hong Kong. With limited staff, the organization focuses on linking the homeless, volunteers, donors, and their own staff. ImpactHK already had a food distribution program that served about 30 people a day before the pandemic. During the COVID-19 crisis, the program expanded to serve 150 people a day. The group also distributed masks and hand sanitizers, although they found the homeless were more concerned with having a place to stay and addressing other more immediate survival needs, according to Wong. For migrant workers in Hong Kong, many grassroots organizations and unions from the community of domestic workers have been active in providing extra support to those in need. According to Marta Catalán Eraso, these groups reached out to the community and gave away masks and other supplies donated by companies. They also provided moral, legal, and health support. The Indonesian migrant workers union even had an online meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo to discuss these issues. The first-ever global online rally of migrant domestic workers took place with more than 500 participants representing organizations from 39 countries, a testament to the power of the pre-existing networks among the migrant workers. In Singapore, several existing organizations have stepped up during the crisis. According to Tan Beng Kiang, NGOs such as Alliance of Guest Workers Outreach delivered meals to migrant workers who are quarantined or under a stay home order. A Singapore choir group “Voices of Singapore” organized a virtual sing-along for migrant workers and kids to raise funds for migrant workers. During the lockdown, religious spaces opened their premises for the homeless, including Malaysians who commute to work in Singapore each day but were stranded overnight because of the sudden lockdown and border closure. In Wuhan, the NGO Wuhan LGBT Center provided health counseling and medicine delivery for HIV patients. They also set up a mutual support WeChat group for people to borrow HIV medication in emergencies. According to a report by Jean Chong of OurRight Action International, “between January 26 until the end of lockdown on April 8, the Center delivered medicine to an average of 200 persons daily,” and “an estimated 14,000 persons received 130,000 bottles of medicine over the entire 74 days of lockdown.” In the Wanhua District of Taipei, a historic district with a high concentration of poor and elderly populations, the dense network of existing social service organizations provided much-needed support for the area’s residents and businesses. With large public gatherings banned during the early part of the pandemic in Taiwan, the network of organizations successfully moved a market event online. The event typically held three times a year since 2016 has been important for supporting local businesses and social enterprises. The success of the online event encouraged the event partners to continue working together, according to Shu-Mei Huang. In Tokyo, YUI Associates is a social enterprise that runs hostel-like hotels and a cafe in Sanya, a neighborhood historically known for a concentration of day laborers and homeless people. The organization operates two hotels for travelers and a third one to serve the homeless and provide them with a more comfortable and dignified environment. During the COVID-19 crisis, the group used one of its travelers’ hotels to accommodate chronically homeless individuals during the emergency declaration. It continues to provide food deliveries in the area for the homeless. Besides formal organizations, informal social networks also played an important role during the crisis. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon found that the drives for food provision during the first few weeks of the city-wide lockdown have relied on social media networks. “There was a resurgence of community kitchens, and efforts were pooled between individuals and the many citizen groups that social media helped gather,” said Guazon. In Hong Kong, Bernard Lee argued that many of these civil society responses during COVID-19 in Hong Kong have their roots in the protest movement in 2019. “Because of the protests, we are much better at organizing ourselves,” said Lee. Among the migrant workers in Hong Kong, there was also informal sharing of masks and sanitizers, as well as emotional support for those returning to their home countries under the lockdown, according to Marta Catalán Eraso. Emerging Mutual Aid and Community Self-Help Besides the existing networks and organizations, the recent crisis also saw the emergence of several new groups and self-organized initiatives. The formation of these efforts suggests new possibilities of community self-help and new forms of civic organizing. They also suggest the potential of civil society particularly in places where such a phenomenon was not expected or was not prominent historically. In Singapore, a society arguably without a strong tradition of civic actions, there has been an outpouring of support for mutual aid and community self-help during the pandemic. A group of students from the National University of Singapore volunteered as translators for the migrant workers with a hospital, “They translated common questions the doctors would ask workers into voice recording and text. (in five languages — Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Myanmar, and Chinese). These were used by the doctors when they communicated with the workers,” said Tan Beng Kiang. On the campus of the National University of Singapore, with a dormitory converted into a community recovery facility where migrant workers discharged from the hospital came to recover, students collected t-shirts and delivered them to the workers (as they could not go back to pick up their belongings) and offered financial literacy classes for the workers. At the Nanyang University of Technology, with the school in lockdown and the canteen closed, an undergraduate student who had just opened a noodle shop in the canteen decided to cook for hundreds of elderly citizens with donations from a crowdfunding campaign. With students having to engage with home-based learning during the lockdown, a group of volunteers formed a group called Community Against COVID that repaired laptops for students in need so that they could continue learning at home. Other groups included “Masks Sewn with Love” that “sewed masks from their home for the homeless, migrant workers, and other vulnerable groups,” said Tan. In Manila, Life Cycles PH was formed by a team of transport advocates, cyclists, and social media campaigners to provide bicycles to frontline workers in need of transport during the community quarantine. According to Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, through the donation of bikes and funds to purchase bicycles in bulk from suppliers, the group has delivered over 1,000 bikes to hospitals and institutions. Also, they have been able to match more than 400 bike lenders to borrowers in the community. Mobility and transportation during the pandemic was a challenge not just in Manila. In Wuhan, known as China’s punk rock capital, music fans from two renowned live houses together with other participants formed a group called LuMo Road Rescue. The group coordinated and gave rides to medical workers during the city’s extraordinary lockdown. Starting with mobility support, the group has since branched out to coordinate donations and distribution of personal protection supplies to those in need, including local hospitals. Wuhan was the site of many other self-help and mutual aid efforts, including those that serve the socially marginalized populations. According to Yang Bao and Shuyun Cao, volunteers formed a support group for pregnant women especially single mothers and same-sex partners. There were also pet owners who organized a support network to care for abandoned pets and those whose owners were missing or could not return to their apartments during the lockdown. The emergence of these novel, self-organized initiatives illustrates the possibilities for community self-help and mutual aid even in societies with a tradition or system of top-down governance. It suggests that when called for by extraordinary circumstances, community groups and informal networks may leap into action. Yet it is also quite possible that these self-help efforts have long existed but were overshadowed by the state institutions and cultural biases that fail to recognize these survival mechanisms.

By Jeff Hou See the original post here. This series of articles represents the outcomes of a two-part webinar, titled Bottom-Up Resilience and hosted by APRU Plus in July 2020. Through a partnership between Pacific Rim Community Design Network and the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub, the discussion brought together a group of activists, organizers, and researchers across the region to critically reflect on their ongoing work in supporting the local communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning from Civil Society and Civic Resilience What exactly can we learn from these different types of civil society responses during the pandemic? What do these cases tell us about social and community resilience from the bottom up? What do they reveal about the longstanding disparities in society? What can we look forward to in terms of sustaining these networks and momentum? Contrasting responses Besides the disproportionate impacts on the mainstream society and the marginalized communities, the contrasting responses from the state and the civil society groups present another parallel across the different geographical contexts. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon found the state’s bureaucratic response to daily emergencies like food supply, mass testing for the virus, and the provision of public transport to be, as usual, delayed and inadequate. As a result, communities turned to self-help and mutual aid as a way to address urgent needs, a pattern also found elsewhere. The experience in China offers a different scenario. In Wuhan, the local government did react relatively quickly but failed to account for the less privileged. Yang Bao and Shuyun Cao argued that “as the pandemic spread, the government’s one-size-fits-all directives could not respond to the detailed needs of all sectors of society.” It was in this context that the self-organized civil networks have emerged in response to the urgent needs of those who have not been helped. In Tokyo, the support from the government in terms of temporary accommodation for the homeless was critical but short-lived. After seven days during the crisis, “people were back on the streets,” said Mago Yoshihira. She went to note, “we were worried about them and that was why we started free ‘food delivery’ to homeless people […] so we can visit them directly and conduct short interviews each time.” “Face-to-face conversation is best to feel empathy,” said Yoshihira. YUI Associates also began to accept people who had newly become homeless due to COVID-19 and assisted them in finding jobs, according to Yoshihira. In other cases, the government response has been a source of longstanding challenges. In Hong Kong, Michelle Wong described the dilemmas faced by the homeless and social service organizations, “even before COVID-19, they stay in tunnels; they stay on the streets, or they stay in McDonald’s.” “They move around quite often, and the reason why they need to move is that the government would remove their stuff in the tunnel or park frequently,” said Wong. This has made the work of volunteers and social service organizations difficult because they cannot locate the homeless, build relationships, and provide support for them. Trust and empathy As a discussant on the first day of the webinar, Kian Goh of the University of California, Los Angeles highlighted the presence of place-based and historically informed local experiences as illustrated by the speakers. Goh noted that many community self-help and mutual aid practices “really have to be built on trust and empathy […] developed among close-knit circles.” Indeed, local practices that built trust and empathy appeared to have played an important role in engendering community responses during the COVID-19 crisis. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon pointed out the notion of Namamangketa as “a way of life” and “a manner of thriving” among the community members she worked with. Asked about how empathy was developed, Guazon noted that empathy among the women partners was built from shared experiences, particularly the struggles with local law enforcement and government. Working with the women partners through the SEANNET project, she learned that a way to live together was “to be with another, to feel the pain of another, to empathize with others.” In the case of LuMo Road Rescue in Wuhan, Yang Bao found trust was already established and deeply rooted in the group, “making the rescue, their donation [drive], and mobilization of resources [go] quite smoothly.” Iderlina Mateo-Babiano also found community resilience to be underpinned by trust in the case of Life Cycles PH. She noted that many of the transactional activities, including the borrowing of bicycles, were based on trust and community spirit or Bayanihan. “There was no money involved; transactions were just purely made on trust and generosity within the community Facebook group,” said Mateo-Babiano. Asked about how trust was developed for Life Cycles PH, Mateo-Babiano suggested that the transactions became a form of relationship building. Following the online transactions, “the group would go and meet up with people to exchange bicycles,” said Mateo-Babiano. The social media platform also allows the group to build trust by being transparent about their actions. Reciprocity and Scalability As place-based and locally-specific actions, Kian Goh wondered about the potential of looking across scales to include different community groups and different levels of government, and if these efforts are bound to one place and one community. In other words, are these civil society responses scalable? In Singapore, Tan Beng Kiang found an untapped resource of people who are interested in helping: “I think there are a lot of people during the lockdown who were at home and they all want to do something [to help] but they can’t get out,” said Tan. Tapping into the potential of these individuals presents opportunities for scaling up. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon found evidence of “a cycle of generative reciprocity” in the example of a chef who converted her restaurant kitchen into a community kitchen and came up with a set of guidelines for establishing community kitchens and for making them safe. A colleague from the university then translated the guidelines into Tagalog or Filipino so they can be widely circulated. “It keeps these efforts going. Some of us may fall out because of fatigue but I think others will be interested to help,” said Guazon. In the case of Life Cycles PH, beyond facilitating the lending and borrowing of bikes, Mateo-Babiano found the group to have expanded their advocacy to create a culture of cycling, “a culture of just and sustainable mobility for everyone.” This includes pushing the government to build more bike lanes and cycling infrastructure to make cycling safe. She found that the conversation has moved from short-term emergency response to long-term needs for expanded infrastructure for more equitable and safer mobility. In the migrant worker community in Hong Kong, Cecilia Chu and Marta Catalán Eraso came across additional actors that served to bridge multiple scales. For instance, they highlighted the role of banks in lending technical support to the workers as they might become future clients. “This suggests that self-help is not really entirely independent […] there is a kind of intricate relationship between institutional engagement and community self-help,” said Chu and Catalán Eraso. Solidarity and collaboration The answer to scalability perhaps already exists in the way that many of these groups and initiatives operate, through collaboration and acts of solidarity. In answering my own question about how organizations adapted to crises and how such adaptation can sustain in the long run, Iderlina Mateo-Babiano sees the sharing paradigm as key, particularly when “fueled by the ongoing advocacy and solidarity of like-minded individuals,” and “a common concern for social justice and human connection.” Michelle Wong had a similar response, “as an organizer I always go back to solidarity as a solution.” For instance, the COVID-19 crisis has led ImpactHK to consider forming a network of homeless advocacy organizations in Hong Kong to address the problem effectively and to lobby the government. “At the end of the day, the government is the resourceful, powerful kind of machine that can do much more than a small organization like us,” said Wong. Collaboration already played a critical role in the ongoing work of ImpactHK. During the crisis, the organization hosted around 200 homeless individuals by partnering with guest houses for travelers. In another instance, to learn about the issues facing the street cleaners and to better support them, Fixing Hong Kong organized a learning session for volunteers with the Hong Kong Cleaning Workers Union so they can “understand more about the difficulty that these street cleaners face,” said Bernard Lee. In Singapore, during the crisis, some of the existing NGO groups have formed a coalition because their work is similar. Instead of everyone trying to replicate others’ activities, “they are combining,” said Tan Beng Kiang. According to Tan, the groups are also partnering with the government because during the crisis, “there are things you can’t do unless you get permission, such as entering the quarantined migrant worker dormitory.” As a result, “there’s now a partnership going on between the government and the NGO groups,” said Tan. Spontaneous solidarity can also take place across borders. In Tokyo, where masks were in short supply during the COVID-19 outbreak between March and June of 2020, YUI Associates received donations of masks from regular customers of their tourist hotel in Sanya. According to Mago Yoshihira, more than 1,200 masks were sent from Shanghai and Hong Kong where the number of infections had declined at the time. YUI members brought these donated masks to rough sleepers and the homeless populations in Sanya as well as a terminal care facility for homeless individuals and a hospital. In answering the question about how civil society responses can be sustained, Tessa Maria Guazon suggests that this can be supported through multi-nodal efforts: “When people work at various scales, if one group suffers fatigue, then another catches them.” Similarly, Masato Dohi, co-founder of ARCH, reflected on the voluntary effort of Tokyo Street Count: “[with] just a small group of two or three people, we can only count a small part of the city and small part of the homeless population, but with hundreds of people we can count the homeless people in Tokyo.” (Nao Kasai further notes that the robustness of the count is not the focus of the argument, but rather that societal inclusivity starts from “I recognize you” at the grassroots level. “Our Tokyo Street Count is an effort to scale up this ‘I’ to ‘we,’ so we can say ‘we recognize you all’ as a society,” said Kasai.) Collaboration and solidarity are indeed keys to how responses of civil society, albeit often modest in scale and capacity, can have a greater collective impact during a crisis and in the long run. They enable groups to maintain autonomy and self-manage while working toward a common goal. By pooling together resources of different kinds, it creates efficiency and allows groups to adapt to changing needs and circumstances and scale-up. Barriers to Civil Society Responses With lockdowns and other extraordinary constraints during the COVID-19 pandemic, civil society responses have their share of challenges and difficulties as well. In Tokyo, Nao Kasai noted that because of limited capacity, the work of ARCH on street homelessness had to shrink. “Many street support activities rely on volunteers, and service providers had to redesign or stop their activities without volunteers during the pandemic,” said Kasai. As a social enterprise, YUI Associates faced a financial challenge during the crisis. With almost no guests by April, they had to close one of the hotels to reduce costs even though the demand from the homeless population has increased, including people who require special care. Other aspects of the widespread lockdown during COVID-19 posed additional difficulties. In Manila, residents from San Roque, an informal settlement in Manila’s northeast protested against the local government during the lockdown. They were dispersed and later arrested as they were deemed by the police to be defying the law against public gatherings. In Hong Kong, where there was already a ban on public gatherings issued by the government to rein in the civil unrest, volunteers handing food to the homeless in the park received warnings from the police because of the restrictions against public gatherings. “I know that some of our homeless friends. They get tickets. They get warnings and tickets from the police,” said Michelle Wong. She suspected that the police were using the ban to “scare them off from the park.” “I think they make use of COVID to get what they want right now because of the protests and also for the homeless; they don’t want them,” said Wong. Faced with this challenge, volunteers of ImpactHK resorted to a flash mob tactic to continue serving food in the park next to their office. Physical and mental fatigue came up as another important issue in the conversation. Tessa Maria Guazon described her experience in Manila, “after what we did for our women partners, I was totally just exhausted.” In her concluding thought on the first day of the webinar series, Shuyun Cao suggested, “we should not over-emphasize contribution or devotion to a great goal […] I think in that way individuals will be swallowed by those great goals.” Instead, she suggests attention to self-care and individual mental health, “then the empathy fatigue will not be that serious,” said Cao. Besides fatigue, it is also important to critically reflect on other challenges facing mutual aid and self-help. Cecilia Chu argued, “all these self-help practices [by migrant workers] when we presented them seemed very positive and enlightening, but in Hong Kong, it’s been really not seen as part of the civic engagement in the eyes of most of the local residents.” Furthermore, she suggested that the community self-help was in fact a reflection of their marginalized position “that so far has not been really breached.” Lastly, Shu-Mei Huang suggested that even with all the focus on the marginalized groups through civil society responses, some groups might still be left out. For instance, while we have better understood the struggles of the domestic workers, we still know rather little about factory workers and fishers, “migrant fishermen […] really can’t make it to public space over the weekend because they don’t have a weekend.” Implications and Lessons for Planning and Design Practices A key question on both days of the discussion concerns the implications and lessons of civic resilience for planning and design professionals, the main audience of the webinars. Iderlina Mateo-Babiano responded with a reflection on her training as a planner, “when I hear the stories […] I think that’s one of the learnings that as a planner we should take on.” “Sometimes we think that we know what are the lived experiences of those for whom we provide public spaces, but actually what we have thought of as the right solution, the right public space, may not really be the right one for the users,” said Mateo-Babiano. For Tan Beng Kiang, a key lesson from the civil society responses was simply to act. She thinks that as designers or as educators, “we can encourage our students to act, even if they are locked down at home or with limited access to visit [a site], etc., what is it that they can do to help? What is it they can do within their community?” Indeed, the cases presented by the webinar speakers would not have been possible without the actions and initial responses. Whether there have been pre-existing networks or not, the most critical aspect of community self-help has been the will and ability to act. While the focus of the urgent and immediate relief was critical, in the grand scheme of things, it’s also important to identify how civic resilience can be supported and cultivated on an everyday basis before and beyond the moment of crisis. As suggested by the role of pre-existing networks and organizations, it is important to engage these networks and organizations in the planning and design of neighborhoods, districts, cities, and regions, and ensure such engagement can help build capacity and strengthen relationships among the groups. Opportunities also need to be provided for those without formal affiliations. As evident in the outcomes of the pandemic, social disparities have been an acute form of vulnerability that threatens not only the underserved and underprivileged but also the society at large. As these social and economic disparities are often reinforced by the built environment, planning and design professions, by and large, have been accomplices to a structure that produces and reproduces these inequalities. Addressing these disparities and closing the gaps requires the built environment professions to play a more self-critical role and reflect on longstanding assumptions and practices. As we rebuild cities and communities to avoid future outbreaks of infectious diseases, we must ensure that the voices of the less privileged are not left out. As evident from the cases highlighted in the webinars, a seemingly insignificant change in the everyday environment and everyday life can have a significant impact on the vulnerable populations. Additionally, a well-intended policy or measure can have unintended consequences especially if the concerns of those who are not at the table are not accounted for. We must avoid the pitfalls that have plagued the rescue, relief, recovery, and rebuilding efforts in the past that have deprived rather strengthened the communities in need. Finally, as Kian Goh noted during the webinar, “mutual aid community self-help is not a cure-all.” There are structural issues that will require much more substantial effort and perseverance. But as the experiences highlighted through the webinar have indicated, seemingly robust structures can fail and when they do, civic resilience can play an important role in saving lives and supporting communities in need. Furthermore, changing and rebuilding the structures will also require the efforts of civil society in holding the state and institutions accountable. A deeper and more critical understanding of civic resilience is the first step toward the long-term safeguarding of cities and communities beyond the pandemic.

APRU Global Health Working Groups provide a platform for experts and scholars to develop joint-research and share lessons-learnt. During a webinar held in May 2020, experts brought together by the Global Health Bioethics Working Group examined ethical challenges in both research and clinical care associated with COVID-19. The inter-disciplinary and international nature of the event offered participating scholars the unique opportunity to analyze these challenges from diverse perspectives and publish the findings in the Journal of Global Health Science. View the paper here. Find out details about the authors and the webinar here.

By Yojana Sharma Original post in University World News While many university leaders around the world fear post-COVID budget cuts due to squeezed economies and – for many host countries – a drop in fee income from foreign students staying at home, top universities in Hong Kong and Singapore say their research funding is relatively secure, which enables them to take a longer view. The disruption caused by pandemic lockdowns affected day-to-day university work and research, but COVID-19’s impact on all sectors of society has opened the window to changes in research towards tackling societal challenges that require a longer perspective and an interdisciplinary approach. “We should think out of the box and [take] the long-term perspective,” Wei Shyy, president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), told University World News. “We are not just trying to fight this particular pandemic. There are many large humanity-level challenges.” Research needs to be “purpose-driven” and interdisciplinary, Shyy said, adding that while this is often talked about, until now it has not been accorded sufficient energy or motivation. Shyy said there had been a move towards a more short-term approach to research in recent years. But as a result of COVID-19, “we have seen how connected many issues are, not just science and technology, but also policy, psychology, economics, culture and many other areas.” The university is encouraging academics and researchers to be aware of societal challenges in selecting research topics, even in fundamental research. “It’s not just pandemic research, but the pandemic has been an example. We are not de-emphasising any particular research area, just encouraging more mission-oriented thinking at the earliest stage,” Shyy said. “The research focus will definitely change to look at the more pressing issues of the aftermath of COVID-19, as well as some of the important challenges uncovered by COVID-19,” Tan Eng Chye, president of the National University of Singapore (NUS), told University World News. “Singapore has always been very forward-looking in not cutting the research budget,” Tan noted. In late May, ahead of a general election, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat unveiled an early budget for 2021, against the backdrop of the International Monetary Fund’s prediction that Asia, which saw the fastest growth globally in the past decade, would see zero growth in 2020 – the worst growth performance in 60 years. Heng announced SG$20 billion (US$14 billion) in basic and applied research funding for 2021-25, to also include research into “solutions for some of the world’s major challenges”. The current five-year research budget to 2021 is around SG$19 billion. “COVID-19 has given us an opportunity. We have resources now and this is perhaps a good time to make big changes to put us in a better position for the future. We do not want change to be forced on us, but to lead the change,” said Tan. With research funding secured, “we need to relook at our systems and how to make them more robust, to be able to adapt to shocks and shockproof our institutions and our community. But it also begs the question of the relevance of the university. The way we teach, we learn, the way we do research,” Tan said, referring to the need for a cross-disciplinary approach that will affect all areas. “Collaborations will be very important because we do not have a wide spectrum of skill sets and knowledge for a complex problem like a pandemic. COVID-19 throws at us problems and challenges that no single discipline is able to address. Because we don’t have all the strengths in one university, collaboration between universities will be important,” says Tan. “Universities have to depend on globalisation and the free flow of information because this is how we do research. We have to leverage off one another,” Tan added. “We hope that universities can stop the trend of de-globalisation and perhaps regionalisation, which we feel is not a good trend.” Even during the pandemic, NUS set up a major new collaboration with Peking University in Beijing on public health crisis management to exchange case studies on COVID-19 control in China and Singapore. “Peking University will have access to a lot of data and information, vital for COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccine development,” Tan added, while Singapore points to a very high survival rate as something other countries can emulate in improving public health systems. Climate change and other global challenges Shyy and Tan both mention climate change and climate change mitigation and resilience as future challenges to focus on, as well as artificial intelligence, automation and Industry 4.0. “During the pandemic crisis we noticed information security and cyber-security were threatened, so that is very important,” Tan said, pointing to the need to invest in backup IT systems. He added that COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of Industry 4.0. “A lot of this is already on our radar, but COVID-19 has accentuated the importance of this area and that we have to work on this much faster.” He pointed to longer term food security as a new research area, referring to the disruption in food supplies from neighbouring countries during the pandemic. Singapore depends on imports for 95% of its food, with only 5% produced nationally. “Over the next 10 years we need to increase that to 30%,” Tan said. “It is possible with urban farming, agritech and aquatech, and we need to research these.” University research collaborations slowed during the pandemic due to travel restrictions, but the university leaders said they will become stronger again. COVID-19 research Universities like HKUST and NUS, which serve densely populated urban areas, were quick to align research to the needs of the health system and society. The campuses at HKUST and NUS were mainly closed during their respective lockdowns. But in Singapore some 200 researchers continued with COVID-19 related research through lockdown in a shift system to minimise contact, developing among other things a ‘symptom checker’, now widely used in Singapore, which helped in stepping up COVID-19 testing. The Duke-NUS Medical School identified the neutralising antibodies for serological testing for highly accurate testing for antibodies that work against the COVID-19 virus. Some HKUST researchers were already involved in research stemming from the 2003 SARS outbreak which could be re-geared for COVID-19, for example, an anti-microbial liquid which can be sprayed on surfaces and is effective for three months. Another project brought into practice was an autonomous vehicle to deliver food and medical supplies without needing a driver. “Usually universities are considered to be a kind of ivory tower, but we have never been so closely linked to aspects of daily life,” Shyy said. Push towards interdisciplinarity Beyond the immediate crisis, the consensus among university leaders of the need for more interdisciplinary research is strong. Agile institutions like HKUST and NUS are determined to use changes in attitudes in academia to push through important reforms at the institutional level. Tan pointed to his own plans for NUS for “tearing down structures that inhibit interdisciplinarity”. “We are going to have a big overhaul of our academic system, by freeing up the structure and injecting more flexibility for departments and faculties to collaborate across disciplines. I’m also changing the financing and budgeting of our NUS system to facilitate this,” he said, adding that the changes will affect every university faculty and department. He acknowledged it will not be easy and there will be resistance within the university community. But the goal and timetable are clear. After changing the institutional structure, “the next step is to build a critical mass of faculty passionate about interdisciplinarity,” he said, noting that he believes he can achieve these changes within two years. “This would also have to factor in how we recognise and reward faculty members,” he said. But convincing students could take longer. “We need to ensure interdisciplinary research can feed on education and vice versa. It’s important for learners to accept this. We will have to work hard to make sure our students buy in. “Students would be easier to convince when we expose them to real life problems, to internships and experiences outside of the university in the real world,” Tan said. “We are trying to get the employers on board and, I guess, once senior students have gone through this and have seen the benefit, they will impress on junior students to ask for more.” New campus In Hong Kong, Shyy is keenly aware that interdisciplinary structures are extremely difficult to bring into an existing university, even one as young as HKUST, which was founded in 1991. “You have a disciplinary establishment – the departments, the schools – already in place. They are here to stay and they should stay, but on top of the disciplines you want to build bridges which is very hard because that is not human nature,” he said. “We need a reset, but the reset cannot replace what you’re already doing in your current place. That’s why we decided to have a new campus devoted to cross-disciplinary pursuits, starting with the academic structure. It won’t have traditional disciplinary units, everything there will be flexible and adaptive.” Shyy is referring to the new campus being developed by HKUST across the border in China’s southern province of Guangdong, with funding from the Guangzhou city government. It is scheduled to open in 2022 and will eventually double the faculty numbers and size of the existing university in Hong Kong. It will offer cross-disciplinary graduate programmes, for example, in autonomous systems, big data, public policy, population and socio-economic development. Other areas are sustainable energy, environment, equity or inequality of wealth, urban policies and city planning and development. Some 250 graduate students have already been enrolled, starting their programmes on the Hong Kong campus. It will have new, additional resources. “So we can have healthy research without upsetting the existing work that we are good at.” Shyy described the role of the twin campuses, with the current Hong Kong campus continuing with discipline-based and interdisciplinary research. “But from the ground up the new campus will be cross-disciplinary with disciplinary depth and support drawn from our current campus, which in turn will tap into the China campus’s cross-disciplinary energy and resources,” he said. “There will be two systems which don’t have to force each other to compromise. They will run in parallel, and we will leverage the talents and the approach from each other.” While the project has been in planning for two years, “the pandemic provides even stronger motivation,” Shyy noted. “Coincidently, it is a very timely opportunity.”

By Yojana Sharma originally published in University World News   Several countries and cities in Asia were able to swiftly control local outbreaks of COVID-19 in part due to the use of contact-tracing apps which locate and isolate those who have been in contact with a patient, to better contain contagion. However, such mobile phone apps have raised data privacy and bioethical issues around their use in public health. “Public health relies on good quality surveillance,” noted Angus Dawson, professor of bioethics and director of Sydney Health Ethics at the University of Sydney, Australia. However, “contact tracing can generate all kinds of ethical problems,” he said, speaking at a June webinar organised by the bioethics group of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities’ (APRU) Global Health Program, noting that it raises issues of privacy, informed consent and confidentially. “One of the concerns is what actually is the data being collected,” said Dawson. “How much of it is identifiable data in relation to particular individuals?” “It is not just a technical issue but a medical one too,” he said, adding that “every intervention in the COVID area has to involve ethical considerations – whether we are talking about distribution of protective equipment, ICU beds, or hopefully in the future when we might have some vaccines.” Apps in use in the region include the Alipay Health Code app in China, which codes people as green or red depending on their health status and requires identity card details as well as full face scans. Hong Kong has the StayHomeSafe app combined with a wristband linked with the app. Developed by Gary Chan, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the app maps a unique footprint of a person’s locality. Stepping out beyond certain perimeters triggers an alert. Taiwan’s Intelligent Electronic Fences System app uses different measures, but with similar functionality. New Zealand’s NZ COVID Tracer app is based on a ‘digital diary’ of places visited by individuals by scanning the official QR codes, which can alert and be shared with contact tracers. Singapore’s TraceTogether app, developed by the Government Technology Agency together with the Ministry of Health, exchanges short-distance Bluetooth signals between mobile phones to detect other TraceTogether users in close proximity. The data is shared once the individual is contacted by contact tracers. The Singaporean app has also been adopted in Japan and Australia. Some of the apps have supplementary functions where individuals can input symptoms to create an alert. What happens to the data? Calvin Ho, associate professor in the faculty of law at the University of Hong Kong researching health and biomedical technologies, said international health regulations drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO) “put a lot of emphasis on technological surveillance as well as rapid technological advances, but it did not quite anticipate the developments that have arisen from this particular [coronavirus] outbreak”. In many of the countries and cities where mobile phone use is high, such apps “have been very effective in controlling the rate of infections – many of the cities did not have to introduce a complete lockdown”, Ho said during the webinar. “However, privacy is a huge question. We do not yet know what is going to happen to the data,” Ho said. “There needs to be public discussion on what principles of data protection have to be observed.” For the public to be willing to take part, trust and transparency is crucial, he added. “In the midst of an outbreak, as we have seen in South Korea, for example, people are very conscious about social responsibility. There’s a very strong societal and peer emphasis so people tend not to invoke their right [to privacy] straight away. That seems to be the phenomena right across East Asia,” he said. But also in Australia and New Zealand, people were extremely cooperative. In Western Europe and the United States, people have been more vocal on privacy issues. “Privacy has not been highlighted as a huge issue across Asia, particularly in the initial stages,” Ho said. “But it does not mean these concerns are not there. Individuals remain concerned about what’s going to be used out of all the data that’s been collected about them. It’s very vivid in their minds.” Involvement of tech giants Ho described the use of such mobile technologies as a form of “mass surveillance”. Some ethical principles are not always followed with surveillance, he noted. The WHO Guidelines on Ethical Issues in Public Health Surveillance, published in 2017, state: “Those responsible for surveillance should identify, evaluate, minimise and disclose risks for harm before surveillance is conducted. Monitoring for harm should be continuous, and, when any is identified, appropriate action should be taken to mitigate it.” Ho, who helped draft the WHO guidelines, noted that they were drawn up with governments and public health systems in mind, rather than corporations or NGOs. Ho pointed to the involvement of technology giants such as Google and Apple in developing some of the apps in use during the pandemic, which raises questions of “whether we are further empowering very powerful industry players with control over public health measures”, and added that it is unclear what such companies will do with the data. “Technically, the data will be owned by these commercial developers. With other contact-tracing apps there should be an agreement with the public at the authority and then the data belongs to the public health authority,” Ho told University World News. Ho added that if such companies are not carefully monitored, “then ultimately it does mean that these huge commercial entities could potentially exploit public health systems and potentially vulnerable individuals, essentially for political gains or some kind of influence over government”. Balance of public health and privacy Dawson, who is also one of the drafters of the WHO guidelines, said COVID needs to be thought about as a “global ethical issue, and not just a concern to an individual”. Issues of data ethics and the balance of personal privacy often “come down to the advantages we might have through having that data”, Dawson said. Public health systems “can have very good reasons to try to understand what the levels of infection are in different regions and cities across the world and then use that to plan how they are going to respond”. He noted that with some of the recent contact-tracing apps, “some of that data is identifiable and some is not”. “We should not just think public good versus privacy. There are ways to try to think about how they are both important and we can put protections in place, for example putting coding attached to individual level data to make sure individuals can’t be identified,” Dawson said. Research ethics Bioethical principles used in conducting medical research can be useful in guiding use and data issues surrounding such apps. This kind of surveillance “is very similar to research in many ways”, said Ho. “It can involve similar methodologies and activities. These can include systematic investigation, medical record review and data mining.” Both involve human subjects and both can raise similar ethical issues, including exposure of subjects to risk, standards of care and questions about informed consent. However, Ho pointed out: “Informed consent is a basic tenet of research ethics, but it is often not sought in the context of surveillance.” Biomedical research has strong regulations in place and systems overseen by ethical committees in universities, hospitals and research institutions. “There is less institutional oversight for surveillance, which means app-based surveillance, data and research derived from it may not undergo ethics committee reviews,” Ho said. With academics and researchers well trained and experienced with research ethics, they can contribute to improving bioethical aspects of surveillance, Ho said, adding that university input into issues of data governance, accountability and transparency measures were likely in the wake of the pandemic. Mellissa Withers, associate professor at the department of preventative medicine at the University of Southern California in the US and director of the APRU Global Health Program, said the bioethics group within the APRU programme would continue to look at such issues to inform policy-makers. “A lot of the experts are involved in research ethics committees, and they are very active in reviewing the ethics of human subject research in their own universities, but more needs to be done across universities and, in particular, there is a real need for sharing and doing training in low- and middle-income countries,” she noted. “There was a lot of interest from [those in] the Philippines and Indonesia attending the webinar which shows they really want some guidelines and recommendations on bioethics. They are interested in building capacity around these areas and learning what’s going on in the field. “Structured regulation needs to be in place or at least these ethical issues need to be considered because there is the opportunity for [data] misuse by governments,” Withers told University World News. “We need more standardised policies that can be implemented across countries because it won’t go away even after COVID-19. The amount of data collected for public health purposes is growing exponentially every year.”

originally published in Tohoku University Tohoku University’s International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) Multi Hazards Program hosted a seminar online on June 17 to discuss strategies and early recovery lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Moderated by Professor Rajib Shaw of Keio University, the international panel of speakers represented perspectives from the United Nations, government, the private sector and academia. Shaw described the COVID-19 pandemic as “one of the longest live disasters” of our time, and warned of seasonal dangers, such as typhoons and heatwaves, that still await. “It will be a long journey so we need some strategies to learn to live with risk.”   Kicking off the lectures was Yong-kyun Kim, Director General of South Korea’s National Disaster and Safety Control Center. He attributed his country’s success in “flattening the curve,” to decisive and transparent government policies and the extensive use of innovative technology. He cited regular government updates through text messaging and other forms of communication that helped authorities win the public’s trust and cooperation. ICT-based systems and mobile phone apps also gave the government some control in monitoring persons from high risk areas or those who are supposed to be in quarantine. But perhaps the most effective Korean response to the pandemic was the widespread testing, contact tracing and rigorous treatment, which Kim described as “the 3T strategy.” An innovative drive-through testing method allowed people to be tested from their cars, or to walk through a booth. Because the RT-PCR tests could return diagnostic results within six hours, positive cases were dealt with quickly, said Kim. Loretta Hieber Girardet, who heads the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction for Asia and the Pacific, explained how the UN has been working to prevent COVID-19 from derailing the work that had been going on around the world on achieving Sustainable Development Goals. “The world has been looking at COVID-19 as a health crisis, but it goes far beyond that,” she said, adding that the UN has been developing a framework to support countries on issues like urbanization, gender equality, human rights and green recovery. Antonia Yulo Loyzaga, President of the Philippines National Resilience Council, spoke on how the private sector can build resilience, and had three recommendations: understand local risks and vulnerabilities, invest in early detection and warning systems, and have a pre-disaster recovery plan.     She said companies should build their crisis management capabilities by learning from best practices across all sectors, adding that conventional corporate social responsibility is no longer enough. Disaster risk reduction, especially health security, should be embedded in the core values of all corporations going forward. Anchoring the panel was Associate Professor Takako Izumi from IRIDeS. She highlighted the impact of COVID-19 on universities and their level of preparedness to meet the challenges. Izumi, who is also the director of the APRU Multi-hazards Program, shared the results of an April survey of 65 universities in 29 countries, which revealed that nearly half of them did not have sufficient organisational preparedness when the pandemic struck.On the academic front, some institutions also struggled with the shift from traditional classroom learning to online-based learning. Izumi concluded that the following adjustments need to be made to ensure better preparedness in the future: – have adequate business continuity plans (BCP) and emergency management units – use a blended learning approach to education – raise awareness of not just natural disasters, but also biohazard and health risks – build a network with other stakeholders and be part of a wider DRR agenda – have designated funding to scale up preparedness “We see from this pandemic that an all-hazards approach to risk assessment is vital for academic institutions. This includes their emergency response mechanism, as well as information sharing and risk communication systems, such as early warning and evacuation plans,” said Izumi. “It’s also important to have drills and stress tests before the disaster, to make sure the plans work.” The 90-minute event wrapped up with the panelists reiterating the need to understand the interconnected nature of risks. “Certainly COVID-19 for us is a wake-up call around systemic risks,” said Girardet. “You cannot look at risks in isolation.” APRU-IRIDeS MH Program: http://aprumh.irides.tohoku.ac.jp/

By Laura Lambert The program, part of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, is rooted in collaboration, communication and education. originally published in USC News In the shadow of the United States leaving the World Health Organization, and amid rising international tensions, the work of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) Global Health Program, which is housed at USC, is a welcome meeting of the minds, rooted in collaboration and communication, education, rather than politics, sharing, rather than blame. Associate Professor Mellissa Withers of the Keck School of Medicine of USC has been the director of the APRU Global Health Program since 2013. And when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Withers realized it was the perfect time for the conversations at the heart of her program to reach a wider audience. “As this was all starting, I thought, we’re in global health — this is us,” says Withers. “To be able to disseminate the work of the network is impactful.” The pandemic as the great equalizer In May, the APRU Global Health Program hosted a webinar, bringing together five of the leading minds within the network – from Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Mexico and Ecuador – to grapple with the most pressing questions in bioethics, from how best to distribute scarce resources to the role that outdated notions of aging play in managing COVID-19. More than 1,000 members from across the Americas, Asia and Australasia signed up – far more than 350 or so members who typically take part in the group’s annual conference. The influx of new participants made a real impression on Christopher Tremewan, PhD, the APRU Secretary General, based in Hong Kong. “This first APRU Global Health webinar also highlighted a key benefit of virtual platforms in helping to reduce disparities in access to information and training for people in middle-income countries who would likely not be able to attend international conferences in person,” he said. Withers agrees, saying, “There is an interest and need.” There was a need, too, to make the webinars more than just a one-way conversation. “We allowed time for questions, versus just listening to somebody, not being able to interact,” says Withers. “We intentionally did that.” After the webinar, members in Singapore and the Philippines sent in additional guidelines for health care workers, further disseminating information in a way that reflects the collaborative nature of the APRU network. “It’s not just an opportunity to talk about bioethics,” says Withers. The webinars provide a way to practice the kind of cross-cultural work that is at the cornerstone of global health. Promoting international conversations in an increasingly global world Connecting across borders and time zones requires certain cross-cultural competencies, not to mention technical logistics – and the APRU Global Health Program webinar was not the first time members have been able to hone such skills. Since 2015, APRU Global Health has also hosted for-credit graduate-level distance education courses on the topics of leadership and ethics, where students and faculty from at least three research universities from across the Pacific Rim come together to investigate and discuss of-the-moment topics from a variety of cultural vantage points. Says Withers, “It’s building the skills they will need in the future.” For USC students who have taken part, the courses have been transformative. Louis Litsas, a lab manager in Toronto who earned his MPH from USC in May, credits the Global Health Leadership course with developing his cultural sensitivity and listening skills. “It was an evolution of my global eyes,” he says. “The COVID experience has shown me that the global perspective is what my vision has to be in the future. It can’t be local anymore.” For Bethany Deford, who took the APRU Global Health Ethics in Research and Practice course in the fall as an elective for her MPH program, the cross-cultural conversations made a huge difference when, after graduation, she returned to work as a traveling nurse in the midst of the pandemic. Ethics were always at the forefront in the ICU, Deford explains, especially as traditional hospital practices were up-ended in the midst of the health care disaster. “It was a lot of preserving dignity and patients’ rights,” she says, of the work she strove to do. And for Diana Dimapindan, who also took the ethics course, the interdisciplinary nature of the course was key. “I’m a policy student,” she explains. “There were lawyers in the class, physicians in the class, and soon-to-be public health policy makers. I think that broad range of students perspectives is what made it so meaningful. And it’s amazing, logistically, that it even works, having all those countries dialing in.” The conversation continues Bioethics was just the first of APRU Global Health Program’s coronavirus-related webinars. In June, a series of eight additional webinars, co-hosted by the APRU Global Health Program and USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health, kicked off, grappling with on COVID-19 and how it intersects with, for instance, mental health, environmental health or human rights. “We can look at COVID-19 from many different aspects,” says Withers. “We need engineers, anthropologists, lawyers, psychologists. It’s not just medicine and public health professionals.” The goal of the conversation, then, is to be both international and interdisciplinary – and now, more than ever, students, researchers and faculty around the Pacific Rim are primed for this kind of conversation. “Luckily, people who weren’t paying attention to global health before are interested in what we’ve been talking about,” says Withers. “There’s a general shift in sentiment — and a new appreciation for the importance of the work we do.”

On this page you will find: Resources Seminars, Workshops, and Discussions APRU members resources for Covid-19   We express our concern and support to our members at this very difficult and unpredictable time. The APRU Chair and Secretary General have expressed their concern in this letter to APRU members in China and Hong Kong SAR. To assist APRU members as you confront this health challenge and associated policy responses from around the region we have posted this web page. During the SARS emergency, APRU universities found it very helpful to know what others were doing to respond.  Therefore, we have put up this web page which includes links to members’ websites stating their policies and the actions they are taking.   APRU Plus: Addressing the Crisis   The ongoing COVID-19 situation has provided us with a reminder that even in uncertain times, APRU is a diverse community of people who lead, create, inspire and learn—together. APRU members are already sharing their policies and actions responding to the crisis on our webpage Coronavirus emergency and APRU universities.   As a service to our members, we have prepared APRU Plus an online hub of information for all of us working virtually. This hub gives members access to webinars, knowledge exchange, and communications updates about the ongoing health crisis and the universities across the Asia Pacific.   Resources   Universities’ Preparedness and Response Towards Multi-Hazards: COVID-19, Natural, and Human-Induced Hazards The APRU Multi-Hazards program hosted by Tohoku University collected case studies to learn about the efforts made by universities in the response and preparedness toward the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other hazards such as earthquakes, fires, and anthropogenic hazards. It also aims to investigate how to prepare for future pandemics and disasters more effectively.   This compilation which includes 26 case studies from 13 countries and region is a record of what had happened as well as the success and failures. It is crucial to learn from these experiences and to be prepared for future hazardous events. This publication will also be useful for universities to strengthen their current strategy and plan to establish a resilient campus against various types of hazards to protect the lives of the university community as well as the assets on campus.   Download the report   Vaccine research deepens university-industry collaboration   The intensified search for a vaccine against COVID-19 has pushed vaccine research to the top of collaborative medical and R&D research projects between Japanese universities, drug companies and the government in Japan.   For example, it is funding a university-led task force for joint COVID-19 research projects established by prominent Japanese universities, including the University of Tokyo, Keio University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kitasato University and Osaka University, with experts from diverse fields, including infectious diseases, virology, molecular genetics, genomic medicine and computational science.   Read full article >>   UQ vaccine scientists report positive results from pre-clinical testing   Pre-clinical testing of The University of Queensland’s COVID-19 vaccine has produced positive indications about its potential effectiveness and manufacturability.   Read full article >>   HKUST’s All-Round Efforts to Help Fight COVID-19 Pandemic   The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 since December 2019 has been sweeping across continents, with confirmed cases surpassing 220,000 and death toll exceeding 8,000 worldwide to date. This highly contagious virus has quickly flared up elsewhere and become an unforeseen global challenge. The entire HKUST community as a global citizen has a role to play in the concerted response to this significant public health threat.   Read how HKUST is fighting COVID-19 now >>       Practical recommendations for the management of diabetes in patients with COVID-19   Nanyang Technological University, Singapore   Stefan R Bornstein, Francesco Rubino, Kamlesh Khunti, Geltrude Mingrone, David Hopkins, Andreas L Birkenfeld, Bernhard Boehm, Stephanie Amiel , Richard IG Holt, Jay S Skyler, J Hans DeVries, Eric Renard, Robert H Eckel, Paul Zimmet, Kurt George Alberti, Josep Vidal, Bruno Geloneze, Juliana C Chan, Linong Ji, Barbara Ludwig   National Response to COVID-19 in the Republic of Korea and Lessons Learned for Other Countries   Juhwan Oh, Jong-Koo Lee, Dan Schwarz, Hannah L. Ratcliffe, Jeffrey F. Markuns  & Lisa R. Hirschhorn Article: e-1753464 | Received 30 Mar 2020, Accepted 06 Apr 2020, Published online: 29 Apr 2020 https://doi.org/10.1080/23288604.2020.1753464   The second affiliated hospital released the Guidebook of Hospital Response Strategy to COVID-19   Zhejiang University   Drawing upon the firstline experience of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine in the fight against the pandemic, a guidebook – COVID-19 outbreak: Hospital Response Strategy was released on April 11, which offers applicable references to a wider audience.   Fast Funding for COVID-19 Science   Science funding mechanisms are too slow in normal times and may be much too slow during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fast Grants are an effort to correct this.   If you are a scientist at an academic institution currently working on a COVID-19 related project and in need of funding, we invite you to apply for a Fast Grant. Fast Grants are $10k to $500k and decisions are made in under 48 hours. If we approve the grant, you’ll receive payment as quickly as your university can receive it.   Corona Virus (COVID-19) “Infodemic” and Emerging Issues through a Data Lens: The Case of China   Jinling Hua and Rajib Shaw * Keio University, Fujisawa 252-0082, Japan; [email protected] *Correspondence: [email protected]   Building resilience against biological hazards and pandemics: COVID-19 and its implications for the Sendai Framework   Riyanti Djalante (a,b), Rajib Shawb (b, c,), Andrew DeWit (d),     a. Academic Programme Officer, United Nations University-Institute for the Advances Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), Japan b. Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR), Japan c. Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Japan d. School of Economic Policy Studies, Rikkyo University, Japan   female lab technician doing research with a microscope in the lab. coronavirus How Elsevier is supporting your response to COVID-19 Elsevier has made a variety of resources available to support our partners in the research, higher education and health communities March 24, 2020 – Updated March 26, 2020   Covid-19’s highly infectious nature means there is a pressing need to find solutions. Universities can help Image: REUTERS   From virus-slaying air purifiers to delivery robots, how university inventions are fighting COVID-19 World Economic Forum Agenda 16 Mar 2020 Wei Shyy, President, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 中文/日本語/Français/English COVID‐19 Effe cts on US Higher Education Campuses View report  The Institute of International Education (IIE) is studying the effects of COVID‐19 (coronavirus) on global student mobility on U.S. higher education campuses. The series is to provide more information about the effects that COVID‐19 has had on international student mobility, and the measures U.S. higher education institutions are taking regar ding international students currently on campus and those abroad, international students interested in studying in the United States, and U.S. students planning to study abroad. The first survey was launched on Feb. 13, 2020, and specifically focuses on the effects of COVID‐19 with regard to academic student mobility to and from China. As the COVID‐19 outbreak evolves, IIE will administer follow‐on surveys to the U.S. higher education community to monitor the unfolding situation and to keep the international education community informed. For more information, please visit www.iie.org or email [email protected].   Harvard University Coronavirus (COVID-19)   Seminars HKUST x University of Southern California Webinar: Sustainability as the New Normal – A Vision for the Future 17 November 2020 10:00am – 11:15am How will 2020 pandemic change the future sustainability policies in U.S., Hong Kong, China, and the world? USC Professor Marlon Boarnet and HKUST Professor Hong Lo, renowned scholars on transportation, environment, and urban planning; with Professor Christine Loh and Noah Miller, subject experts and strategists on environment and climate change, will talk about the new definition of sustainability after the pandemic and how the disruption forces us to change in every aspect. Head of Sustainability at HKUST, Davis Bookhart, will moderate the discussion. More information is available on the HKUST website >> Register by November 15th HKT >>   Japan MEXT Top Global University Project Online Symposium: International Collaboration in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic Time: September 30th 17:00 (JST) Register here. With the spread of COVID-19, international exchange at universities is entering a new phase. Although online lectures have become prevalent in Japan, universities around the world are now considering various means of international collaboration in education and research including online exchanges and hybrid styles that combine both virtual and physical interaction. In this symposium, new ideas and case studies will be shared and discussed regarding the future of international exchange in education and research. By clarifying the common hallenges faced by global universities and awareness of these with regard to international exchange in the post-COVID era, the symposium aims to help sketch a new blueprint for higher education along with what international exchange should look like in the future. For more information about the symposium, please visit the website.   Japan and the World in the Era of COVID-19: Considering whether the new paradigm is a crisis or an opportunity Register here for the final webinar with a wrap-up discussion in English on July 29. COVID-19 brings significant impacts on peoples, countries, and the world. It is thought that this will bring earth-shattering changes in the future. By examining Japan’s response to the first wave of COVID-19, the analyses implied that vulnerabilities on informational infrastructure and delay of innovations and social implementation were showed in several cases. To gain a deep understanding of the new paradigm, Keio University has organized four webinars bi-weekly from June 17 to July 29. The series include a broad range of topics from health, technology, economy to law. Experts from Japan and around the world provide international perspectives based on their active involvement in fighting against COVID-19. For more information about the webinar series, please visit https://www.kgri.keio.ac.jp/en/news-event/070204.html View the recording here in English.   WEBINAR: Korea University Medicine The Next-Normal Conference 2020 This conference will provide a forum for discussion on predicting the “Next-normal” of human society, including health care, economic growth, development and leadership after COVID-19. Young-Hoon Kim, President of Korea University Medicine says, “it’s time to look for serious concerns and directions for a sustainable human society after COVID-19. We hope that this conference will provide meaningful implications and directions for us in the future, not only in the area of health care but also for social and economic areas of various fields at home and abroad.” The conference will be held in the form of a “hybrid conference” that combines online and offline participation. Date: July 23, 2020 (Thursday) Time: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (Korean Time UTC+9) Enquiries: ​[email protected] Live Broadcast on YouTube. Simultaneous interpretation Korea-English will be provided.   Managing the COVID-19 Pandemic UC Berkeley Self-paced Free Course The course will provide you with a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the pandemic. We have gathered faculty with a wide range of expertise to deliver over 20 lectures addressing essential topics relevant to the prevention and control of this deadly infectious disease that has affected the entire globe. The course starts with an introduction to the history of global pandemics and lessons learned, and then moves on to the biology, epidemiology, diagnostics, and basic concepts in modeling the spread of the virus. The course then shifts to cover prevention and control strategies, including the populations most at risk during this pandemic and the systemic causes of these disparate impacts. Finally, we cover how organizations and individuals are coping, and look at the range of potential health and economic impacts of this pandemic that depend on our global and local responses. The course is followed by a short exam where we allow you to test your knowledge and deepen your learning. Thank you again for your interest in the course. We hope that this course helps you better understand the pandemic and what you can do to respond to it.   WORKSHOP: Using Coronavirus to Teach Science In this new global landscape, how can educators incorporate coronavirus examples to enhance student learning? In this four-week workshop, educators will practice applying principles of active learning, inclusivity, and assessment to develop student learning activities focused on coronavirus in their discipline. Disciplines might include global health, mathematical modeling, biology, epidemiology, sustainability, city planning, and others. Application Deadline: June 20, 2020 Cost: $500 U.S. dollars (If you are interested in attending, but the fee is a barrier, please contact us) Details: July 6 – July 29, 2020 Time: Workshops will be offered at two different times to accommodate a global audience. Mondays and Wednesdays 7-9 a.m. Pacific Time (Central European/Middle East/Africa Time) Mondays and Wednesdays 5-7 p.m. Pacific Time (Asia Pacific Time) We look forward to learning together with a group of educators from around the globe. Please be in touch with Elly Vandegrift, Program Director for Global STEM Education Initiatives with any questions.   [LIVE] “Biases, Norms and Culture: A Framework for Understanding Our Responses to a Pandemic“ Date: June 23, 2020 Time: 16:30 – 17:45 HKT (GMT+8) Register Now The COVID-19 pandemic has put all of us in uncharted territory. No nation is unaffected by the outbreak and there is no uniform formula tackling the crisis. We see varied approaches and responses from cities and individuals.  Join us for the upcoming webinar, as part of the global webinars under the theme “Navigating a World of Disruption”,  in partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology to learn how people respond to the pandemic from different perspectives—social & cultural, public health, public transportation, urban planning & design. Through the academic exchanges, we wish to better understand how the new normal will be in the post-pandemic era. Registration closes on June 23 at 12:00 HKT (GMT+8).   Medical Education in Pandemic: Screen to Screen or Face to Face May 22, 2020 16:00-18:00 (HKT) Hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong During the COVID-19 pandemic, many medical educators have continued to teach their students by adopting new methods in teaching and assessment. As educators, we believe in learning from experience. In this webinar, we will be sharing experiences from medical teachers and students around the world. The audience will hear that bedside teaching may be possible, online education can be conducted interactively, and social distancing may still be compatible with face to face examinations. Most importantly, the audience can gain some insight into the readiness of our students to be doctors during the pandemic. We will have speakers from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. Details can be accessed via the CUHK website. Registration is free on a first come, first-serve basis. Everyone is welcome.   Entering the New Realm of International Higher Education Higher Education Leadership Academy (AKEPT) Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia in collaboration with International Relations Centre (UKM Global) The National University of Malaysia (UKM) Email: [email protected] This program aims to discuss the impact that the current Covid-19 has had on international higher education and how universities are reacting to the situation. It follows through the plan of actions done by universities from different parts of the world in dealing with this global battle. The pandemic has changed what traditional teaching and learning environment used to be like and universities have to now accelerate their speed of transformation in adapting to these new challenges. The panel of experts consist from scholars to practitioners from four different regions sharing their experiences in dealing with this unplanned necessary change. The discussion includes their strategy in embracing this new normal of education and the preparations involved in realizing this strategy.   Tsinghua University – Didi Joint Research Center for Future Mobility March 20, 2020 from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. (Beijing Time) Combating the Coronavirus with Big Traffic Data – China and the World Stay Hand in Hand, Heart to Heart Meeting Agenda Tsinghua University – Didi Joint Research Center for Future Mobility is holding an online seminar on March 20, 2020 from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. (Beijing Time) with the topic “Combating the Coronavirus with Big Traffic Data – China and the World Stay Hand in Hand, Heart to Heart”. The seminar will focus on the applications of big traffic data analytics in coronavirus combat and the experiences that could be shared under international background. In-depth discussions and extensive exchanges will be carried out among leading experts from governments, schools, international organizations and enterprises.   Migrating a Whole University to “Online Real-Time Interactive” Teaching: An Experience-Sharing Forum March 18, 2020 The discussion covered issues such as: Strategic and Technological Decisions​, Faculty and TA Training and Support, Migrating Common Teaching Practices​ (From whiteboards to visualizers), Student Support and Feedback​, Assessments and Exams , and Faculty Experiences​. This webinar is for senior administrators in charge of teaching and learning. A recording of the webinar and resources can be found at the HKUST website.   APRU Members   Australia The Australian National University Contact: Jane O’Dwyer Vice-President (Engagement and Global Relations) Email: [email protected] The University of Queensland https://about.uq.edu.au/coronavirus-advice-uq-community Contact: Mr Rongyu Li Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Vice President (External Engagement) Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement) Email: [email protected] The University of Sydney Coronavirus (COVID-19) research and expertise: Information to keep our global community safe Discover the latest research, analysis and podcasts from our University of Sydney experts addressing the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Coronavirus (Covid-19) infection: University of Sydney advice   China and Hong Kong SAR The Chinese University of Hong Kong Act Together Against Covid-19: https://againstcovid19.cuhk.edu.hk/ CU Medicine on Covid-19: https://www.med.cuhk.edu.hk/covid-19 Contact: Ms. Shally Fan, Director of Academic Links, Office of Academic Links, [email protected] Ms. Amy Chan, Senior Programmer Manager, Office of Academic Links, [email protected] The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Covid-19 Info@HKUST https://covid19info.ust.hk Contact: Eliza Tam Manager (Global Engagement & Greater China Affairs) Office of the Vice-President for Institutional Advancement Email: [email protected] Zhejiang University Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment officially launched   Chinese Taipei National Taiwan University https://www.ntu.edu.tw/english/spotlight/2020/1797_20200130.html Contact information: Campus Health Center: +886 3366-2156, (Office hours，8AM – 5PM） [email protected] Campus Safety Center: +886 3366-9119, (24hr）[email protected] Chile University of Chile Espacio en la web de la U. de Chile que agrupa los contenidos relacionados al COVID-19: https://www.uchile.cl/covid19 Encuesta de Monitoreo COVID-19 realizada junto al Colegio Médico de Chile Web para consultas para integrantes de la comunidad universitaria U- de Chile Iniciativas de integrantes de la comunidad universitaria en tiempos de pandemia: https://www.uchile.cl/ChileCuentaconlaU Propuesta para una Estrategia Nacional de Salud Mental en contexto de pandemia: https://www.uchile.cl/portal/especiales/covid19/163020/estrategia-nacional-para-salud-mental-propuesta-a-mesa-social-covid-19 Japan Keio University Important Notices on COVID-19 (University Measures) Osaka University Latest information about the novel coronavirus from Osaka University Tohoku University COVID-19 Information and Preventive Measures   Korea Seoul National University Link : SNU Academic Policies and Procedures against COVID-19 Infection Contact : 1) SNU Health Service Center : +82-2-880-5339 (From 9am to 6pm) 2) Gwanak-gu Community Health Center : +82-2-879-7131 (24 Hours) 3) Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(KCDC) : 1339 (24 Hours)   Malaysia Universiti Malaya Creating the future of public health México Tecnológico de Monterrey Coronavirus Covid-19 Coronavirus Announcement – Tecnológico de Monterrey Cuida tu Mente     New Zealand University of Auckland Coronavirus outbreak     Philippines University of the Philippines Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Advice for the UP Community    Singapore National University of Singapore NUS advisories:https://emergency.nus.edu.sg/circulars/ Dean of Students’ updates http://nus.edu.sg/osa/resources/dos-update   Nanyang Technological University, Singapore NTU experts fighting the COVID-19 pandemic on all levels Guide for COVID-19 remote consultation by primary carers designed by NTU Singapore scientist and peers   Thailand Chulalongkorn University Download the complete Summary of Chula’s responses to COVID-19. Chula COVID19 website: https://www.chula.ac.th/en/covid-19/ The Great Digital Leap Forward: https://qswownews.com/the-great-digital-leap-forward/ School of Integrated Innovation, Chulalongkorn University Moves to Hybrid Teaching Model Amidst Corona Outbreak CU Introduces Online Learning Innovation Center   USA University of California Berkeley For travel advisory: https://globalengagement.berkeley.edu/faculty-staff/international-travel-resources For health advisory: https://uhs.berkeley.edu/news/health-advisory-coronavirus-2019-ncov University of California Davis UC Davis Global Affairs: Travel Announcement: Novel Coronavirus UC Davis Dateline: Coronavirus: Travel Warning, Other Cautions UC Davis Student Affairs: Coronavirus Update; Precautions During Cold and Flu Season UC Davis Health: What you need to know about the novel coronavirus   University of California Los Angeles https://www.bso.ucla.edu   University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa https://manoa.hawaii.edu/emergency/coronavirus-update/ Contact: Anderson Sutton Dean, School of Pacific and Asian Studies & Assistant Vice Chancellor for International and Exchange Programs email:  [email protected]   University of Southern California https://emergency.usc.edu   University of Washington Novel coronavirus & COVID-19: facts and resources ALERT: COVID-19 travel restrictions  

By By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications, UCLA A group of Bruins minoring in the global health met during the APRU Global Health Student Case Competition. They are now planning careers in the field. The APRU Global Health Student Case Competition gives students an opportunity to practice critical-thinking and problem-solving skills to help solve global health challenges. The competition has brought together young and creative teams of university students to tackle many pressing global health problems with out-of-the-box ideas in helping to facilitate real changes in society.     Originally published by UCLA International Institute.   UCLA International Institute, April 9, 2020 — UCLA students today have an enviable capacity to use multiple communication methods simultaneously when collaborating on a project. It is a skill that will serve them well in the coming months, as all UCLA courses continue remotely due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.The “Gamechangers Team,” a group of global health minors who designed a social media–based health intervention and produced a video about it, have a unique view on the value of communications technology in global health. Over the course of roughly six weeks in spring 2019, six undergraduates (two of whom have since graduated) met once a week in person, exchanged ideas regularly via a smart phone chat room and shared research on project components via Google Docs.The students came together to participate in the annual Global Health Case Competition of the APRU (Association of Pacific Rim Universities), whose 2019 challenge was: “Social Networking Intervention to Promote Physical Activity among Young People in Urban Environments.” The team was comprised of Julia Houshmand (UCLA 2020, molecular, cell, and developmental biology), Franklin Leung (UCLA 2019, microbiology, immunology & molecular genetics), Vera Ong (UCLA 2020, psychobiology), Rene Rosas (UCLA 2019, international development studies), Wendy Tang (UCLA 2021, economics) and Sahej Verma (UCLA 2020, global studies). “I remember that [student counselors] Katie Osterkamp and Magda Yamamoto said, ‘You will be competing with medical students and Ph.D. students.’ — And I thought, ‘Great!’” said Julia Houshmand ironically. “I remember watching some of the past videos — we were very intimidated,” said Vera Ong. “But we just gave it our best shot.” That best shot won the Gamechangers team a place among the three finalists — the first time a UCLA team had placed in this APRU competition. (Bruins have won and placed in several APRU health poster competitions in the past). Building on one another’s ideas and skills The team eventually designed a campus-based intervention that would use competitions between individuals, colleges and professional schools of UCLA (and with other universities in Los Angeles) to build community, increase physical activity and encourage healthier eating. One key idea was to showcase star UCLA athletes interested in pursuing careers in fitness by livestreaming their workouts. Although the International Institute was set to cover the students’ travel costs to attend the 13th APRU Global Health Conference last November, the conference was eventually cancelled due to demonstrations in Hong Kong. In the end, the UCLA team came in third. Surprisingly, the students were remarkably upbeat about the outcome, stressing they had learned so much from the collaborative process. “We went into this not to win the competition, but because we wanted to,” said Houshmand. “It sounded like something that was fun and interesting.” “Stressful, but fun!” added Ong, noting that the team developed their case on a compressed timeline that ran into spring quarter finals. “It was interesting how we all came up with the idea. It wasn’t just one person. Honestly, it was all of us sitting on Kerckhoff Patio and using the Socratic Method, asking: ‘What about this?’ ‘No, no, no, no.’ ‘What about this?’” said Ong. As they progressed, the students divided up research and tasks such as budgeting the hypothetical funding. Franklin Leung, a runner, suggested that the intervention use a Strava application to measure physical activity. He also ended up editing the final case video. “We wanted to create an intervention where people would actually have discussions about exercising together, eating healthier foods and so on,” explained Verma. “We set it up in a competition environment so that if, for example, I and Julia were roommates, we could compete with one another to see how we are doing. The goal was to use those friendly elements to live healthier lives.” A shared interest in global health policy The team members are deeply interested in the social determinants of health, equitable access to health care and health policy. Whether pre-med students, future economists or future health activists, their educations and career goals were a great fit with the video project. Houshmand, for example, is a pre-med senior whose interest in global health was sparked by significant travel and the experience of living between France and the United States for most of her life. “The two countries have very different medical systems,” she remarked. “My classmates in both countries came from a lot of different backgrounds, including refugees and people who were undocumented, and on the other hand, people from the highest levels of society,” she continued. “So I saw a lot of these differences, not just at the level of health, but at the level of access to health care.” “Since I became interested in medicine, I’ve always seen it in a global framework,” explained Houshmand. “When I started taking classes in my global health minor, I realized that I love thinking of solutions and interventions for a health issue not just from a biological standpoint, but also taking into account the historical context, the cultural context, the political climate, etc.” Ong also has significant experience in two countries, having been born in the Philippines before moving to Silicon Valley at a young age. She subsequently traveled frequently to see family in the Philippines. “What really got me into global health was growing up watching my uncle, who is a general surgeon there, serve his community,” she remarked. “Similar to Julia [Houshmand],” she adds, “I have experience of different health care systems and have seen that same lack of access to care,” she adds. Both her interest in global health and her volunteer work in the UCLA chapter of Global Medical Training (2018–2020) deepened her intellectual engagement with health policy. For example, she joined the Health Equity Network of the Americas, where she helped organized international conferences that address topics such as universal health, gender inequality in health access and immigrant health. Doctor in provincial hospital in Bulacan, Philippines. (Photo: ILO Asia-Pacific via Flickr). CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Ong, who plans to become a doctor, eventually came to evaluate potential medical schools partly on the basis of whether they incorporated courses on global and public health in their curricula. “That is a big factor for me in choosing a medical school and in what I want to do in the future,” she said. Houshmand, who is also going to medical school, shook her head in agreement. Verma approaches health policy from a social development perspective, but with insider knowledge of health care — he comes from a family of doctors. An internship for a pharmaceutical lobbying group in Geneva, plus subsequent biotech work experience, helped him define a health policy career direction. Specifically, he seeks to combine health policy with new therapeutic and diagnostic technologies to achieve better health outcomes. To do so successfully, however, requires effective communication. “I’ve had the opportunity to work with a few health economists in the Fielding School of Public Health,” he said, “and I’ve seen how they work to communicate the value of therapeutics and life sciences products to different policy makers to help them devise solutions that will both improve people’s lives and health outcomes.” COVID-19 and its impacts The COVID-19 pandemic has, if anything, increased the interest of the Gamechangers team in global health policy. The race to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infections, for example, directly bears on Verma’s senior thesis. The global studies senior, now an undergraduate research fellow, is researching the role of Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers in developing vaccines against diseases of poverty that are prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. Verma may, in fact, temporarily delay plans to pursue a Ph.D. in health policy and economics so that he can work for the Indian ministry of health as it develops the regulatory infrastructure to speed the development of safe, efficacious and affordable pharmaceuticals. The pandemic is a wake-up call for the United States, said Verma. “Whether it is the inequitable distribution of materials — think therapeutic tools (vaccines), sanitary equipment (masks), life-saving infrastructure (protocols for medical staff in hospitals) or social rigidities (young people not following social distancing norms, while older folks are scared to shop for essential groceries and medicines) — America needs to rethink where its priorities lie as a society,” he continued. An image of the global pandemic in the shape of a COVID-19 molecule. (Image by Miroslava Chrienova courtesy of Pixabay.) “Post–COVID-19 will be a time not only to reconstruct infrastructure, but also to reconcile a communal attitude with productivity arguments,” he remarked. The UCLA student believes that the pandemic will lead many young people to study health policy in order “to challenge existing rationales about mechanisms of healthcare in the USA.” Ong has been struck by how much the pandemic has highlighted pre-existing flaws in public and global health policy. “It exposed just how much our current systems were unprepared for a pandemic such as this, and how much we need to improve as global and local communities,” she commented. “COVID-19 definitely shows the importance of global communication, teamwork and transparency, as well as the importance of forming pre-planned protocols to minimize potential consequences,” she said. Ong, who is currently working with the UCLA Learning Assistants Program to help professors navigate Zoom and better engage their students remotely, is seeing firsthand how time-efficient and useful such interactions can be. “With an increased focus on telemedicine, I can see similar benefits within the medical field,” she said. “By decreasing overall waiting time and providing more scheduling flexibility, telehealth could encourage patients to be more active in consulting physicians overall, increasing doctor-patient interaction and treating illnesses early.” Verma also believes that one outcome of the pandemic will be a revival of doctor-patient interaction. Yet the barriers to effective telemedicine remain significant, with equitable access to communications technologies at the top of the list. “The COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting the gaps in communications infrastructure, with restricted broadband speeds amid increased usage,” he pointed out. How regulators and the government support the adoption of these technologies will be the true litmus test of their efficacy in serving community health needs, insisted Verma. Ong points to additional barriers that must be addressed before telehealth can become a reality, including lack of technological literacy among physicians and patients, hacking dangers and lack of a robust protocol. As for the immediate future, Ong — like Houshmand — heads off to medical school in the fall. Verma will begin working as a research assistant at University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. Expect these Bruins to make their mark on global health policy in the coming decades.   Published: Thursday, April 9, 2020  

The APEC “Healthy Women, Healthy Economies” (HWHE) has found that sex-disaggregated data and gender based research and analysis is lacking. Policy makers, business leaders and others do not have adequate data and evidence to draw from to identify gender-specific interventions appropriate for their economies and organizations. To spotlight and spur much-needed data and evidence, Chile, along with Merck’s support, has created an annual prize recognizing research that enables policy makers, business leaders, and others to identify and implement measures to improve women’s health in APEC economies so women can join and rise in the workforce. Dr. Mellissa Withers, Director of the APRU Global Health Program, was chosen to be one of the judges of this contest in 2019. Prize The winner of the prize will win USD $20,000, while the 2 runners-up will win USD $5,000 each. If the winner or runner up is from government then the prize money will be given instead to HealthyWomen (a women’s health not-for-profit). Alternatively, the winner or runners-up may designate a not-for-profit entity to receive the prize money. Please attribute the research to all involved in its making, but only one individual may be nominated and eligible to receive the prize money and present the research. Eligibility In order to be considered for this prize, individuals must submit an original piece of research that is no older than two years of age as of January 1, 2020. All are welcome to apply; you do not require a background in academia in order to be considered. However, the research must be evidence based. Furthermore, the research must be submitted in English. If the research was not originally written in English please have it professionally translated. Application Materials  Application (**Please use this for applying. Send completed version to [email protected]**) APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Application Form APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Prize Flyer For more information, please visit the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies website. Contact [email protected] for any questions.

APRU congratulates Dr. Juhwan Oh, a long-standing member of the APRU Global Health Program’s advisory group, for the successful launch of the Journal of Global Health Science (JGHS). The open-access, peer-reviewed international online journal officially published by the Korean Society of Global Health advances research to support policy, practice, and education in the field of global health by publishing papers of high scientific quality from diverse stakeholders in the global health community. JGHS’s focus is on under-served populations in the low- and middle-income nations and marginalized groups within otherwise prosperous nations. As a reflection of the successful start, JGHS will turn to quarterly publication this year, from biannually during the inaugural year 2019. APRU sees JGHS as playing an important role. Although unparalleled improvements in living conditions, poverty reduction, and life expectancies were made in the last century, many more global challenges lie ahead, including aging, urbanization, migration, environmental degradation, rising rates of chronic diseases, as well as social and economic inequalities. “Confronting the health challenges of our modern world requires challenging conventional wisdom with new ideas that reflect the changing global landscape; the launch of JGHS is an important step in advancing global health by creating a platform to share and debate scholarly research from around the world,” said Dr. Mellissa Withers, Director, APRU Global Health Program. “I am pleased to see that the focus of the JGHS is under-served populations in low- and middle-income economies and marginalized groups in high-income economies, and I am certain that JGHS will expand the opportunity to share high quality scientific work through an open-access format,” she added. JGHS places special focus on the following topics: reproductive, maternal, neonatal, child, and adolescent health; infectious diseases, including neglected tropical diseases; non-communicable diseases including cancer and mental health; injury; humanitarian aid; nutrition; universal health coverage; health law; global health workforce; health systems; surgery; health technologies; people centeredness; and health policy. The journal specially aims to focus on interconnecting diverse key stakeholders: community leaders; national and local members of parliament; national and local health officials; professionals from academic institutions; non-state actors; clinical and laboratory experts; and multilateral and bilateral agency officials. The scope of JGHS accommodates diverse styles of submissions including Original Research Articles, Review Articles, Short Research Notes, Editorial, Comments, and Letters from Field. Special niches within JGHS include articles on scientific program evaluation as well as any debating comments on official development aid.

APRU Global Health Program released its latest report on Workplace Wellness (WW) finding that although many universities have implemented a range of programs designed to promote employee health and well-being, these programs are often not designed in a strategic or comprehensive way. The report was initiated at the Global Health Conference 2016, a special workshop on workplace wellness was held on the first day of the conference. A Sydney Statement on Employee Health and Well-being was announced and called on our universities to fulfil the responsibility to their employee’s health and well-being. Responding to this call, the report is based on an online survey conducted by the APRU Global Health Program (GHP) and completed by 29 universities in 13 Asia-Pacific economies in 2018. The survey aimed to assess the range and scope of employee health and wellness programs at universities in the Asia-Pacific; evaluate gaps and challenges; and facilitate the crafting of recommendations. “We identified a number of innovative and successful workplace wellness programs that our member universities offer, such as fitness challenges and health screenings, but programs relating to mental health, violence, and smoking cessation are especially lacking,” Prof Mellissa Withers of USC says. “The results demonstrate that the main perceived challenge of workplace wellness programs is lack of employee participation,” she adds. The survey suggests that participation suffers from a lack of protected time for employees to engage in WW programs. It also found that few universities offered financial rewards (such as discounts for health insurance or salary bonuses) for employees who have healthy lifestyles. The report moreover cited universities’ insufficient usage of social media or mobile phone messaging to disseminate health information to employees. Among the commendable case studies highlighted are The University of Hong Kong’s Walking Challenge, which entails a goal number of steps for the HKU community to walk together. In October 2018, the challenge expanded to involve over 1,500 people from more than 17 countries and amassed 463,447,412 steps—equivalent to walking 7 times around the world. Another case study is the Domestic Violence Support Policy by The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, which supports members who are directly or indirectly experiencing domestic violence, including by offering paid domestic violence leave of up to 10 days. The University of Southern California, for its part, offers an attractive reward scheme for smoking cessation, with staff and faculty who do not use tobacco or commit to enroll in a tobacco cessation program receiving a $25 reduction per month in paycheck contributions for their medical plan.   Download the report >> The APRU Global Health Program, launched in 2007, is hosted by the University of Southern California and is led by Program Director, Professor Mellissa Withers. By facilitating collaboration and enhancing regional dialogue, the APRU Global Health Program works to bridge health divides, promoting and protecting population health and meeting shared health challenges.

The inaugural APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize is now accepting applications for outstanding research that strives to improve women’s health, economic well being, and inclusive growth. The winning entry will receive USD $20,000 and two runners-up will receive USD $5,000 each. Theme The prize aims to highlight and spur the creation of sex-disaggregated data and gender-based research that will help decision-makers make more evidence-based policies to improve the lives of women and strengthen the regional economy. Based on The Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Policy Toolkit, the five research topics are: workplace health and safety health awareness and access sexual and reproductive health gender-based violence work/ life balance Requirement Individuals must submit an original piece of research that is no older than two years as of January 1, 2019. Applicants may be individuals or teams (with one leader listed) who are from an APEC economy. No academic background required. The research must be evidence-based and addresses at least one of the topics outlined in the toolkit. The research must be submitted in English. Find out the full list of requirements. Must be an APEC member economy. Submission & Deadline To submit your application form, click here. The deadline to submit applications is July 5, 2019. Prize The winner of the prize will win USD $20,000, while the 2 runners-up will win USD $5,000 each. If the winner or runner up is from government then the prize money will be given instead to NGOs. See details here. The top three finalists will have the opportunity to present their research to members of the APEC Women and the Economy Forum in La Serena, Chile. The prize winner will be announced at the annual Women Leaders’ APEC Roundtable during the 2019 APEC CEO Summit in Santiago, Chile in November 2019. APEC CEO Summit is Asia-Pacific’s most influential meeting of business and government leaders. Contact Contact [email protected] with any questions.  

APRU provided valuable recommendations to shape APEC’s health-related agenda at the third Senior Official Meetings (SOM3) held in mid-August in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. At the APEC “Healthy Women, Healthy Economies” workshop,” Mellissa Withers, Director of the APRU Global Health Program and Associate Professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, presented on the assessment of workplace wellness programs implemented by universities in the Asia-Pacific region with a specific focus on gender. The assessment is based on a recent survey of APRU members, who represent collectively more than 140,000 staff and approx. 2 million students, regarding their range and scope of employee health and wellness programs. Withers pointed out that the survey showed the top priority was chronic diseases, with violence prevention being last priority. Among the other findings cited were low employee engagement in programs, lack of budget, and programs often being regarded as low priority. Many programs were “token” as opposed to comprehensively or strategically designed, and data is not being routinely collected. “We recommend regular, in-depth, mandatory sexual harassment trainings and more formal protocols for handling complaints,” Withers said. “Universities should implement specific, written policies on discrimination, and workplace culture should be more supportive of women and less tolerant of violence and abuse,” she added. Withers went on to represent the APRU Global Health Program at the 8th APEC High Level Meeting on Health and the Economy (APEC HLM8). Her presentation at APEC HLM8 addressed the wide-reaching consequences when primary health care does not adequately support women with a focus on economic loss. Among Withers’ recommendations were routine screenings, more victims services, shelters and hotlines, as well as the establishment of sexual violence units in police, hospitals and primary care facilities. “The availability of counseling and support services with collaborative, multi-disciplinary teams must be ensured, and there should be workplace support programs for women experiencing intimate partner violence,” Withers urged. “There also is a need for more relevant national policy and formal legislation with designated budget,” she added. The APEC HLM8’s keynote addresses were held by Honorable Sir Dr. Puka Temu, Minister of Health and Chair-APEC HLM8, Papua New Guinea, and Dr. Shin Young-soo, Regional Director, World Health Organization – Western Pacific Region. A ministerial panel on putting people at the center of health care through primary health care included panelists: Honorable Michiyo Takagi, State Minister of Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, Japan; Honorable Shih-Chung Chen, Minister of Health and Welfare, Chinese Taipei; and Honorable Dr. Puka Temu. APRU’s contributions to the SOM3 reflects its strong commitment to continue actively feeding into APEC’s health-related agenda. The aim is to inform policy makers and collaborate on activities supporting economic development of the region.

The winners of the APRU Global Health Program Conference Student Poster Contest 2018 emerged from 36 excellent submissions from students from 10 economies. They were judged by APRU Global Health Advisory Group members. The winners are: UNDERGRADUATE 1st Place: Anak Agung Diyananda Paramita (Warmadewa University) 2nd Place: Bonardo Hasiholan (University of Indonesia) 3rd Place: Megan Ren, Jason Zhang, Rishi Makkar, Nicolas Gonzalez, Mili Patel (University of California, Los Angeles)   GRADUATE 1st Place: Mengge Han (Fudan University) 2nd Place: Jocelyn Dracakis (The University of Sydney) 3rd Place: Sarah Lawrence, Betty Nguyen, Jacqueline Pei (University of California, Los Angeles)   The 1st prize winners in each category will receive a USD$100 gift card during the awards ceremony at the annual APRU Global Health conference 2018 which is going to be hosted by University of Malaya on October 28-30, 2018. All student posters will also be presented at the conference.

For this year’s inaugural APRU Global Health Program Case Competition student teams were encouraged to consider a balance of innovative yet realistic, evidence-based solutions for the competition challenge Preparing Pacific Rim Countries for Natural Disasters’. The plot created for this case study is fictional and bears no direct reflection to any existing organisation or individual and was created exclusively for use in the 2016 APRU Global Health Case Competition. Any reuse, reproduction, or distribution of this case material must be approved by the USC Institute for Global Health or APRU. For questions, please contact Mellissa Withers at [email protected]. Here are the videos of the winning team, Our Lady of Fatima University and the finalist teams from Tohoku University and Kyoto University: Winning Team: Our Lady of Fatima University Finalist Teams: Tohoku University and Kyoto University (L-R)