Chapter 38: Fostering Equitable, Sustainable Wellbeing For All: UW–Madison’s Global Health Institute

This chapter explores how the UW–Madison Global Health Institute (GHI) evolved from a health-sciences/education-oriented entity to engage the entire campus enterprise across education, research, and outreach. GHI runs a campus-wide effort to grapple with today’s complex global health challenges. The Institute works across UW to leverage resources, create interdisciplinary global health solutions, and introduce students to concepts at the heart of urgent health needs at home and abroad and spanning from the personal and public to environmental and planetary health and wellbeing. GHI is guided by a global health ethic that recognizes that individual health is linked to health for all, and across generations and follows a One Health and Planetary Health approach, that is, recognizing the interdependence between human health, wildlife health, and ecosystem-level processes. By outlining how the GHI was established, this chapter explores how UW leadership brought various disciplines together to create the Institute, which has been able to establish undergraduate and graduate-level certificates—and led to an undergraduate major which launched in 2020—in global health. The chapter also explores a number of other collaborations, such as the UniverCity Alliance and the 4W (Women & Wellbeing in Wisconsin & the World) Initiative, and grant competitions that foster interdisciplinary research around global health.