The University on Wednesday announced the creation of the Yale Global Health Initiative, the first offshoot of the newly created Jackson Institute of Global Affairs.

The multidisciplinary program will unite the range of efforts on campus concerning global health, support increasing student interest in the area and stimulate faculty research.

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“By harnessing individual innovation and stimulating collaborative research and teaching, the Yale Global Health Initiative promises to make significant contributions to global health scholarship, education and leadership,” Provost Peter Salovey said in a statement announcing the new initiative.

Elizabeth Bradley GRD ’96, a professor of public health, has been named the director of the new effort. With the aid of a University-wide advisory committee, she will work on developing what she described in a telephone interview as the initiative’s three foci: education, leadership and research.

The initiative will also support Yale’s Global Health Leadership Institute, which Bradley began working on almost two years ago and formally launched in February. The institute is holding its first conference, “Strategic Problem Solving in Global Heath,” next month. The week-long event will bring together leaders in global health from around the world.

“Our framework splits the program into two kinds of programs,” Bradley said of GHLI. “One where we’re trying to work with country leaders on a whole set of projects in different countries and one that involves working with students here to develop a program that will focus on leadership in global health.”

Partially funding the initiative is a grant that Yale received this week from the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. The Framework grant, as it is known, aims to enable work across disciplines on global health issues. The grant came about because the NIH received an unexpected influx of funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. (Dartmouth College, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of New Mexico also received grants.)

The Jackson Institute of Global Affairs was launched in April with the support of a $50 million gift from the former pharmaceutical executive and philanthropist John Jackson ’67 and his wife, Susan. The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies also provided support for the creation of the Yale Global Health Initiative, the University said.