The WiRED International Center for Community and Global Health at CGU is a transdisciplinary center that provides the university, its students and faculty with a variety of opportunities in global and community health education, research and community service. The WiRED Center at CGU strengthens graduate education by providing students and faculty with international and domestic training and opportunities for access to WiRED’s programs, projects and educational materials worldwide.
The mission of the WiRED International Center for Community and Global Health at CGU is to bring vital medical and health education, free of charge, to underserved communities around the world, while developing students into exceptional community and global health professionals, researchers and teachers.
WiRED embraces and enacts global health diplomacy, bringing together the disciplines of public health and international affairs to demonstrate to local populations an abiding concern for the well-being of outside agencies and organizations. WiRED supports the development of a systematic and pro-active approach to advancing global health. Further, it engages in collective action to promote health risk reduction, elevating prevention as a key component of community health. It advances prevention through community education, a strategy reinforcing its view that community health begins with knowledge.
Some of the activities of the WiRED Center at CGU include:
- Facilitating and providing medical and health education, research and research collaborations at multiple sites around the world
- Disseminating research results through informal sessions, research conferences and publications, meetings, newsletters, WiRED’s website and outreach programs and other activities
- Enhancing opportunities to secure extramural research funds, programmatic contracts and grants
- Carrying out university and public service programs across the globe
The WiRED Center at CGU has created a formal mechanism to foster new collaborative public health and training initiatives across CGU and WiRED. The initiatives have strong potential for public health impact and could substantially advance the mission of CGU, in general, and the School of Community & Global Health (SCGH), specifically. As a few examples, SCGH strives to provide outstanding training in community and global health, and the WiRED Center at CGU will provide an immediate major boost to its global health mission and will expand its domestic work as well (for example, into under-resourced rural or tribal communities). Some of the major potential benefits of the WiRED Center at CGU to the mission of SCGH in addition to training are to: expand the real impact of SCGH to the health of communities worldwide, expand the potential to develop new more powerful interventions, expand the collaborative base to address a greater number of health issues, and create new avenues of funding to support activities of faculty and students to enhance health worldwide. Because the WiRED Center at CGU will integrate students whenever possible, students will have the opportunity to witness and learn how to implement and potentially lead major public health education campaigns. This will help the new center advance CGU’s stated mission of preparing students to become leaders for positive change.
Principal faculty members:
Co-Directors:
Dr. Gary Selnow, Research Professor, SCGH
Dr. Alan Stacy, SCGH
Dr. William Crano, Division of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences (DBOS)
Faculty members: Dr. Eusebio Alvaro, Jason Siegel, Paula Palmer, Jay Orr, and Dr. Maryam Othman (Western University of Health Sciences)
Background of structure of WiRED:
WiRED International, is a 25-year-old NGO that comprises the structure on which the WiRED Center at CGU is founded. It is a volunteer-driven organization with a traditional leadership structure: a CEO (and founder) Dr. Gary Selnow; a responsible and active volunteer Governing Board, with a Board Chair, Dr. Charlotte Ferretti (Professor of Nursing and Director Emerita Edelman Institute, SFSU); and a Secretary/Treasurer, Dr. Suellen Crano (Vice President, Strategic Planning and Institutional Effectiveness, Western University of Health Sciences). WiRED’s Medical Education Director is Dr. Maryam Othman (Director, Global and Community Health, Western University of Health Sciences). WIRED has three boards: a Governing board, an Advisory Board, and an Honorary Board.
WiRED’s Governing Board members:
- Gary Selnow, Founder and CEO (SFSU, Professor Emeritus; CGU, Research Professor SCGH)
- Charlotte Ferretti, Board Chair (Professor of Nursing and Director Emerita Edelman Institute, SFSU )
- Stephen Browning (CH2M HILL, Senior Vice President)
- Richard Carmona (17th Surgeon General of the U.S.; President of the Canyon Ranch Institute Board of Directors and Distinguished Professor of Public Health, Professor of Surgery and Clinical Professor of Pharmacy Practice and Science at the University of Arizona)
- Suellen Crano, Secretary/Treasurer of the Board (Western University, VP-retired)
- Elizabeth Fine (Virginia Tech, Professor Emerita)
- Violet Grgich (President and Co-Proprietor of the Grgich Hills Estate, a Napa Valley winery)
- Saul Hammond (Hammond Company Insurance, retired)
- Robert (Tony) Hodge (Anthony Hodge Associates Executive Search, retired)
- Mark Kelleher (Broderick Haight Consulting, Senior Associate)
- Allison Kozicharow, Director of Communications (ICF Global Communications-Consultant)
- Maryam Othman, Medical Education Director (Western University of Health Sciences, Associate Professor Global and Community Health)
- Adam Robinson (36th Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy; VA Maryland Health Care System, Chief of Staff)
- Christopher Spirito, Chair, Technology Development Committee (Idaho National Laboratory, Nuclear Cybersecurity Consultant)
- Anne Marguerite Stephens (Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Sr. Director)
- Sameer Verma (SFSU, Professor, Information Systems, College of Business)
To learn more about WiRED and its programs, please see the website: www.wiredinternational.org