Global Impact

The UMass Chan Office of Global Health (OGH) was founded in 2009 to enhance and expand UMass Chan research and training programs in global health improvement and disease prevention.   UMass Chan is engaged across the globe in clinical and research partnerships to improve health worldwide. 

In 2010, UMass Chan donated 500,000 doses of tetanus/diphtheria vaccine (Td) to help earthquake victims in the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.  In addition, a medical school team, including Provost and Dean Terry Flotte and colleagues from UMass Memorial Health Care traveled to Haiti to provide direct care to victims.

In an effort to substantially improve medical care for war-torn Liberians, UMass Chan is partnering with the University of Liberia and Indiana University to establish health care training programs in the impoverished African nation.  Funded by a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the partnership is creating the Center for Excellence in Health and Life Sciences at UL, offering new academic and research programs in biotechnology, public health, nursing and pre-clinical training in medicine and pharmacology.

A development by MassBiologics of UMass Chan has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year with a new cost-effective medication to prevent rabies.  MassBiologics of UMass Chan, which is the only non-profit FDA-licensed manufacturer of vaccines in the United States, is working with the Serum Institute of India on clinical studies of this monoclonal antibody to the rabies virus.

Tens of thousands of people in the Dominican Republic, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan received crucial vaccines donated by MassBiologics of UMass Chan.

In 2013, Foreign Policy Magazine names UMass Chan immunologist Katherine Luzuriaga, MD  a Leading Global Thinker for HIV research.