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Columbia’s shared vision for easing the burden of human disease extends far beyond the borders of its Washington Heights campus. Its partnerships improve medical care and build healthier families around the world. Columbia P&S physicians, researchers, and medical students can be found in tiny villages in Venezuela and Ecuador, in vast laboratories in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and on campuses in the Middle East. Some 40 percent of Columbia P&S students spend at least part of their undergraduate years overseas, in eastern Europe or western Africa, the Caucasus or the Caribbean. As we’ve seen over the past two years, the United States has a vital interest in international health, both for our own national security and as a part of our commitment as a good global citizen to care for those in need. By sharing research, resources, and experiences with colleagues in health care around the world, Columbia P&S is helping to break down barriers between nations. Joanna Rubinstein’s new role as associate dean for institutional affairs will be to expand Columbia’s international outreach, underscoring our commitment to an ever-broadening worldwide network of partnerships. Dr. Rubinstein’s efforts include establishing new relationships with institutions in Asia and Europe with a particular focus on expanding opportunities for clinical trials. She will collaborate with international patient programs at New York-Presbyterian Hospital to enhance outreach overseas, bringing more patients to New York for comprehensive care and opportunities to participate in research. We have much to build on. In 2002, Columbia P&S added the latest of 14 international medical education affiliations with overseas medical schools when it signed an agreement with Fudan University in Shanghai. The Fudan agreement, like others with schools in Europe, Asia, and Australia, permits foreign students to come to Columbia P&S to study. Every year, many P&S students travel throughout the world as part of the medical school’s longstanding commitment to international health. Soon, a new international fellowship program sponsored by the P&S Class of 1953 and named in memory of legendary tropical medicine professor Harold Brown will support fourth-year medical students who want to do rotations in underserved regions throughout the world. Also, a new administrative committee on international health, with student representation, will provide coordinated guidance for all four health sciences schools in developing new international ventures. One of the most ambitious of these cooperative international ventures honored its first graduates in 2002. In May, 26 men and women became the first students to graduate from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev M.D. Program in International Health and Medicine in collaboration with Columbia University. The BGU-CU M.D. program is the world’s first medical degree program designed to train doctors for the practice of international health and medicine. In addition to the traditional medical school coursework and an augmented curriculum that includes cross-cultural medicine, health-care economics, and refugee health, the graduates completed two-month international health clerkships in India, Kenya, Ethiopia, or Israel. Students in the BGU-CU M.D. program complete clinical electives at Columbia during their fourth year.
Columbia’s unique Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine, headed by Dr. Marianne Legato, expanded its global reach in 2002 through a new collaboration with Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. Karolinska has formed the first Center for Gender-Specific Medicine in Europe. Asia represents the next international frontier for the Partnership, which established ties this year with Japan’s Governor Akiko Domoto to develop gender-specific medical centers throughout Japan that will also provide education for practitioners. For more than 20 years, neuropsychologist Dr. Nancy Wexler has spent six to eight weeks every year working with a large extended Venezuelan family living near Lake Maracaibo—a family through which the gene for Huntington’s disease runs like a spreading river. Her work with this family led to the discovery of the Huntington’s gene, and the 18,000-person database she has built over the years continues to help develop models for potential treatment. Dozens of Columbia neurologists and other faculty have traveled to Venezuela with Dr. Wexler to participate in the research and to witness the devastating impact of this disease on families and communities. Dr. Wexler is one of many Columbia P&S clinicians and investigators who share their professional expertise with people in need around the world. Others include orthopedic surgeon David Roye, who chairs the medical advisory committee of the Children of China Pediatrics Foundation, a charity that brings U.S. surgeons to orphanages in China. Pediatric critical care specialist Katherine Biagas, plastic surgeon Jeffrey Ascherman, and pediatric surgeon John Schullinger, also on the advisory committee, have joined Dr. Roye on trips to China to operate on orphans with a variety of surgical problems, including cleft lip and palate, orthopedic anomalies, and urologic abnormalities. A faculty directory of international activities outlines the many examples of faculty clinical and research involvement abroad. Pediatricians Alan Ross and Solomon Cohen bring primary and preventive care training to Albanian pediatricians in the war-ravaged Kosovo town of Prizren, rotating one U.S. pediatrician per month through the small hospital there to teach modern therapeutic techniques. This year, the program expanded to include rotations in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Another successful international collaboration is Columbia’s exchange program with China, developed by trustee and alumnus Dr. Clyde Wu. Senior fellows from Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong spend up to two years at Columbia P&S, to research and study areas of particular interest to Chinese specialists, such as infectious diseases, immunology, oncology, and endocrinology. (Osteoporosis, in particular, interests the Chinese scientists, as it’s a new problem in the Asian population.) When the fellows return to China, they continue the work at their home universities. The exchange goes both ways: Columbia P&S has benefited from the expertise of geneticists from Shanghai’s advanced genetic center, and Chinese visiting fellows share their experience with diseases like esophageal cancer, which is more prevalent there than in the United States. More than 40 scientists have participated in this program.
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ISRAEL & THE UNITED STATES Faculty and students from around the world work together in th-e Ben-Gurion University of the Negev M.D. Program in International Health and Medicine in collaboration with Columbia University. The programxs charter class graduated in 2002, becoming the worldxs first doctors trained for the practice of international health and medicine. Students complete course work in Israel before starting clinical electives at Columbia. 
Faculty pictured here with a student reflect the international makeup of the program. From left are Dr. Lynne M. Quittell, P&S professor and chairwoman of the admissions committee for the Ben-Gurion-Columbia program; Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum, P&S professor and director of the Ben-Gurion-Columbia program; Takaaki Wada, a fourth-year Japanese student in the Ben-Gurion-Columbia program; and Dr. Mick Alkan, Ben-Gurion University professor and international health and medicine coordinator of the Ben-Gurion-Columbia program.