USU Graduate Students Win First Place in Prestigious Emory Global Health Competition
A team of four graduate students from the Uniformed Services University took top prize in this year’s Emory Morningside Global Health Case Competition.
Remle Scott, Airyn Nash, Joshua Trowell, and Kevin Guan, graduate students at USU, won top honors in this year's Emory Morningside Global Health Case Competition in Atlanta, Ga. (Courtesy photo) |
March 23rd, 2023 By Sharon Holland
A team of four graduate students from the Uniformed Services University (USU) took top prize in this year’s Emory Morningside Global Health Case Competition.
Remle Scott, from the Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics program, and Kevin Guan, from the USU Molecular and Cell Biology program, Joshua Trowell, from the Emerging Infectious Diseases graduate program, and Airyn Nash, from the Medical and Clinical Psychology program, competed against 29 teams from six countries and four continents to take the first place honors in the annual event.
The Emory Morningside Global Health Case Competition brings together students from diverse disciplines and multiple countries to address a real-world global health challenge. This year’s competition took place from March 10-18 in Atlanta, Georgia, on the Emory University campus.
Teams were comprised of four to six members, with representation required from at least three different schools or disciplines within their university. Students had only one week to put together their case solutions to a hypothetical, but realistic, global health challenge.The competition consisted of two rounds, each requiring a live 12-minute presentation, followed by an eight-minute question and answer session. The second of the two rounds had to incorporate a twist in the case. The teams with the five highest first-round scores advanced to the final round and were eligible for monetary prizes as well as bragging rights.
This year’s competition theme was “Preventing Maternal Death in Haiti’s Central Plateau.”
The solution, proposed by Scott, Guan, Trowell and Nash focused on improving access, delivery and quality of prenatal care through community ownership of maternal mortality to decrease maternal death. Their strategy, “Matwons bay Manmans: Preventing Maternal Death in Haiti’s Central Plateau”, consisted of training matwons (traditional birth attendants), developing maternity waiting homes with a central clinic, and establishing a network of neighborhood matwons to provide prenatal care.
“Emory's global health competition is only a week long, and our team this year had 4 students, 2 less than previous years. I'm thankful and proud to have led an interdisciplinary team who were all determined to put forth our best work to come up with a creative, sustainable, and realistic global health solution,” says Scott.
This is USU’s third win in the last five years. The USU team took second place in 2019, with their solution to the theme, “A Storm’s A-Comin’! Implementing Innovative Hurricane Disaster Preparedness Strategies in a Changing Global Climate.”The University of Melbourne in Australia took first place that year.USU students did not compete in 2020 or 2021, but in 2022, the University’s team took second place in the competition behind Yale University.The theme they addressed was "Taking on Environmental Health Disparities: Developing Health Action Plans to Improve the Health of Indigenous Peoples."
The team, advised by Dr. Gossa, demonstrated superb problem-solving in addressing a real world global health issue - maternal death in Haiti. This win from an extremely competitive field, emphasizes the importance USU places on global health throughout ourschools and disciplines," says Dr. Eric Elster, dean of USU's F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine."We are extremely proud of our students and their commitment to finding solutions to these very real issues."