For the past two days. Yale’s Global Health Leadership Institute (GHLI) has been trading ideas with public health leaders from 20 different countries.

On Sunday, two faculty members from the GHLI went to Canada for the 2011 Global Health Conference — an annual international event where public health leaders gather to share their ideas and work. This is the second consecutive year in which the GHLI participated in the conference, said Martha Dale SPH ’80, director of the GHLI China program, though School of Medicine faculty members have been attending for years.

“[Going to the conference] increases our visibility but also the real quality and depth of our global health programs at Yale,” said Elizabeth Bradley GRD ’99, professor of public health and director of the GHLI.

The GHLI focuses on educating public health leaders across the world, specifically by working with health ministers and faculty at international universities in developing countries to help them start public health leadership programs.

Dale gave a presentation at the conference about creating partnerships with academics and ministers of health, developing a strong academic curriculum that includes a field component and encouraging students to create professional networks with faculty and each other. In her presentation, she drew on lessons she learned from working in Liberia, Ethiopia and China. For instance, at the university she worked with in Liberia, she said, at first only half of the faculty was involved in the curriculum. But by the end of the project, she said, the public health program involved the entire university.

“[The conference] is a treasure chest of information,” Dale said. “It’s through the exchange of ideas, even over a cup of coffee, that you can make incredible connections.”

Along with Dale, Jeannie Mantopoulos SPH ’08, assistant director for the GHLI’s on-campus programs, gave a presentation entitled “Rethinking Conference Models for Global Health,” which proposed a model for global health leaders to examine the issues of coordinating clinics and hospitals.

Bradley said that the benefits of participating in these conferences are mutual for Yale and other institutions.

“Hearing the cutting edge work at like universities working in global health, meeting scholars and educators from all over to understand their challenges and share possible solutions and being able to test out our ideas and innovations with peers and see how they fly with others [are some advantages of participating at the conference],” Bradley said.

The conference ran from Nov. 13-15.

Correction: An earlier headline for this article misspelled the acronym of the Global Health Leadership Institute (GHLI).