Harvard - Brazil Office - DRCLAS - David Rockefeller Center for ...

prevent or reduce the morbidity or mortality from that disease. At the end of the course students present
and discuss the results of their project with the entire class and collaborators.
This year the number of HSPH applicants nearly doubled, with 15 students being selected from a very
competitive group, including one student who recently served two medical tours in Iraq. Fifteen students
from leading institutions throughout Brazil were selected by the local host institution through a
competitive and open process. This annual course, which is co‐organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Office, is
one of the concrete outgrowths of the inaugural 2007 Harvard‐Brazil Symposium on Public Health.
Numerous symposium participants, including Guilherme Ribeiro, former Lemann Fellow at HSPH and
one of the lead course coordinators, played key roles in the 2009 course.
Participating Harvard faculty: Mary Elizabeth Wilson, Associate Professor of Global Health and Population
(HSPH) and Associate Clinical Professor at the Harvard Medical School (HMS) [Faculty Lead]; Sofia Gruskin,
Director, Program on International Health and Human Rights and Associate Professor of Health and Human
Rights (HSPH); Marcia Castro, Assistant Professor of Demography (HSPH); John David, Professor of Tropical
Public Health, Emeritus, Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases – Emeritus (HSPH)
Collaborators: Mitermayer Galvão dos Reis, Director and Professor, Centro de Pesquisa Gonçalo Moniz,
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Salvador, and Professor, Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública [Course
Faculty Lead from Brazil]; Paulo Gadelha, President, Fiocruz, Albert Ko, Visiting Professor, Fiocruz‐Salvador
and Associate Professor of Medicine, Cornell University; Maria Amélia de Sousa Mascenas Veras, Assistant
Professor of Social Medicine, School of Medical Sciences, Santa Casa de São Paulo; Eduardo Luiz Andrade Mota,
Professor, Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA); Eduardo Massad, Professor, Universidade de São Paulo (USP);
Eliana Almeida Gomes Reis, Fiocruz‐Salvador; Guilherme de Sousa Ribeiro, Visiting Researcher, Fiocruz‐
Salvador and former Lemann Fellow (2006) at HSPH; Jackson Mauricio Lopes Costa, Senior Researcher,
Fiocruz‐Salvador and Professor of Human Pathology, UFBA; Luciano Kalabric Silva, Public Health Technologist
in Pathology and Molecular Biology & Professor, Biotechnology in Health and Investigative Medicine, Fiocruz‐
Salvador; Maria Ines Costa Dourado, Associate Professor, Institute for Public Health, UFBA; Alberto Pellegrini
Filho, Senior Researcher, Fiocruz‐Rio de Janeiro.
HMS‐FCMSCSP Researchers of the Future Initiative
Five promising medical students from the Medical School of the Santa Casa in São Paulo (Faculdade de
Ciências Médicas da Santa Casa de São Paulo‐FCMSCSP) spent seven weeks (between January 12, 2009
and February 27, 2009) working in the areas of cardiovascular and molecular biology at labs in the
Harvard Medical School (HMS). Each of the five students had more than ten hours of laboratory safety
and good practice training. They participated in more than 350 hours of wet laboratory bench work and
25 research seminars and lectures at HMS and affiliated institutions. They made many contacts and are
already planning several collaborations between HMS and FCMSCSP. This year, the five students were
selected from over 90 applicants; they were: Thiago Iorio Tagliari, Marta Maria Kemp, Thiago Bosco
Mendes, Thomas Filipe Pellegrini Lopes, and Gabriel Simoes de Freitas Galvão. Once again, Brazil’s Tide
Setúbal Foundation provided the financial support for round‐trip airfare, housing, meals, and health
insurance for the Brazilian medical students. The goals of the program were fully accomplished.
This is the second year of this program, and this time the HMS hosting faculty member was Prof. Cesario
Bianchi, Director of the Cardiothoracic Research Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and
an FCMSCSP alum (MD’81). This initiative was started in 2007 by Prof. Antonio C. Bianco, then Director
of Research of the Thyroid Section at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, after his participation in the
first Harvard‐Brazil Symposium organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program. (Prof. Bianco is now
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