Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Like for many of you, our 2020 has been quite an adventure at the International Center for Child Health and Development (ICHAD) and SMART Africa Center. This spring, we put our 10+ field studies focused on reducing poverty and improving health outcomes on pause. Remarkably, our teams in Uganda, Ghana and Kenya quickly adapted and by late summer after undergoing safety protocol trainings, they shifted to a new way of conducting research via phone interviews, socially distanced community collaborative meetings, and outside multiple family group, vocational and financial literacy trainings.
In our continued efforts to promote capacity building this summer, our U.S. team also hosted 25 new trainees from around the globe interested in pursuing research careers in adolescent mental health, health disparities and/or HIV. Over our 10 weeks zooming together, we supported one another through isolation and social unrest occurring in the U.S. while learning about propensity score analysis, logistical regressions and implementation science. We enjoyed meeting new members of the “family” virtually and look forward to continuing these relationships into 2021.
Collectively, our team has done too many zoom meetings to count – yet ironically, this distanced experience has brought us even closer! We can just pop into each other's lives via impromptu staff meetings and birthday celebrations – which wasn’t as easy to do pre-COVID.
We hope 2021 brings more peace and health across the globe and look forward to working with you all to make our corner of the world a little brighter.
We wish you good health, hope, and happiness this holiday season!
With Gratitude,
The ICHAD and SMART Africa Teams
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