£5000 challenge launched
Open to many students to win the chance to develop a project further
The Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) has announced that it is holding its student challenges competition, with an increased prize of £5000 to develop the winning project further. This is the second year that the competition will be running, and the award is aimed at supporting research at Imperial that has a focus on tackling health problems and challenges throughout the world. The IGHI want the competition to be “an opportunity to showcase work”. The project is open to those studying BSc, MSc, MEng, MPH, MRes or MBA. The students’ final-year projects will be the basis for their entry.
The evaluation criteria of submitted work will include the technical or business innovation, but also analysis of global health impact and economic application and feasibility. The Institute wants encouragement of novel concepts that can cover any feature of global health in devolved and developing countries.
Last year’s £2000 prize was awarded to John Chetwood, then a fifth year medic, whose project used urinary biomarkers to create a new diagnostic tool in order to detect an aggressive form of liver-fluke associated cancer, Cholangiocarcinoma (CGA). vCGA has increasing incidents worldwide and has very high rates in areas of South East Asia. John aims to use the prize money to validate findings in a larger study and has goals in developing a urine dipstick to detect the cancer earlier and more accurately.
The 2012 competition was chaired by Sir Liam Donaldson, former Chief Medical Officer and Chair of Public Health Policy at Imperial. Jane Dreaper, BBC health correspondent, and Sarah Brown, maternal health activist and wife of Gordon Brown, were also included in last year’s judging panel.
Entrants are going to have to adhere to their respective department’s final year project guideline of the home department and submit their completed thesis with 250 words abstract with their supervisor’s covering letter of support to the competition. A thesis should be emailed to ighi@imperial.ac.uk by 14 January 2013 in order to enter the competition.
For further information you should contact: ighadmin@imperial.ac.uk
