Grant: CIHR New Investigator

In a world where rapid breakthroughs in the health sciences are constantly surfacing, reaping the rewards of such advances requires global collective action among the world's governments, civil society organizations, businesses, and international agencies. Unfortunately, our understanding of how global health efforts can be best governed, financed, and delivered remains rudimentary. The detrimental consequences of the lack of adequate global governance mechanisms are apparent. Pandemics spread between countries within hours. Medicines are manufactured by varying standards . Moreover, many people suffer from conditions we already know how to address in cost-effective ways, such as through improving basic sanitation practices. Clearly, there is a demand for improving global governance arrangements. To accomplish collective action on this forefront, it necessary to synthesize adequate evidence, develop new methods, and produce a platform for knowledge translation. The Global Strategy Lab (GSL) is specifically designed to bridge this knowledge gap by building on interdisciplinarity, research methodology, and knowledge translation, ensuring the Lab is a world-first in its mission, focus, and way of working. The GSL's interdisciplinary approach will include using evidence from fields such as epidemiology, law, political science, sociology, and economics. We will further achieve interdisciplinary collaboration by fostering a global network of leading researchers in the field, and serving as a flagship for collaborative, multi-center research, education, and policy initiatives. Additionally, the GSL will represent a pioneering effort to use rigorous meta-analytic, quasi-experimental, and big data methods in order to synthesize high-quality, empirical evidence. Lastly, the Lab will contribute to knowledge translation by providing opportunities to train the next generation of policy