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The mission of the Penn PSOM Center for Global Health is to improve health equity worldwide – through enhanced public health awareness and access to care, discovery and outcomes based research, and comprehensive educational programs grounded in partnership. It is through the kind of initiatives that the Center sponsors and oversees, that the vision of a healthier world will be realized. While population health is becoming ever more important in our highly connected world, federal funding is often insufficient to meet the growing needs of researchers and practitioners to investigate the latest epidemics, innovate from other models and predict the next outbreak or global health developments.
Ways to Give
Where it is needed most
Contributions that are unrestricted give our Center the flexibility to direct funding to areas where the need is the greatest at any given time. To make your tax-deductible contribution now, please visit our secure Online Giving form for unrestricted gifts.
Online Giving Form
Targeted Initiatives
Center Scholars are at the forefront of global health innovations and thought leadership. By partnering and leveraging resources, our researchers and scholars will stay on the forefront of this quickly changing field. To make your tax-deductible contribution now, please visit our secure online Giving form for restricted gifts.
Named Funds
A gift of $25,000 or more establishes a fund in honor or memory of a loved one and enables you to direct resources to specific research initiatives, new pilot programs, faculty support, or education for the next generation of physicians and researchers leading global health.
Targeted Initiatives
The McCracken/MacCracken (McMac) Student Travel Award for Indigenous Health provides financial assistance to two final-year Perelman School of Medicine students participating in educational and experiential learning at Indigenous health sites in the United States.
Dr. Joan MacCracken MD ’71 established this award on the occasion of her 50th Medical School Reunion to provide Penn medical students the unique opportunity to challenge their cultural biases, familiar surroundings, and medical aptitude. In 1974, after completing her Pediatric Residency in Denver, Colorado, Dr. MacCracken and her husband moved to Crownpoint, New Mexico to work at the Indian Health Service Hospital. Her two years of medical service with the Navajo people, and later with the Yup’ik natives of Alaska and the Miskito people of Nicaragua, were stimulating, rewarding and memorable. Dr. MacCracken hopes to encourage Penn Med students to experience culturally different medical environments and in parallel to grow in their professionalism.
ELIGIBILITY
- Final year Penn medical students confirmed in a clinical elective at an affiliated Indian Health Service (IHS) site. Affiliated IHS sites found here.
- Interested students must receive a confirmed placement from IHS before applying for the travel award.
- Students must be in good standing and approved by the Perelman School of Medicine to schedule away electives.
- Applications must be submitted and approved prior to travel.
CONDITIONS OF AWARD
- Award amount is $1500. Award cannot be combined with CGH Travel Stipend for IHS rotations.
- Applicants must complete all pre-and post-travel requirements as set by the Center for Global Health (CGH).
- University of Pennsylvania travel policies shall apply to the McMac Student Travel Award. Students must complete a Concur report upon return from travel to receive award money.
- Award recipients will submit a report of their global health experience to CGH within 6 weeks of return to campus. Any aligned photographs must comply with consent for use regulations.
About the McMac Student Travel Award for Indigenous Health
Dr. Joan MacCracken MD ‘71 established the McCracken/MacCracken Travel Award to honor her grandfather, Dr. Josiah Calvin McCracken MD ’01, and his Penn alumni descendants.
Dr. Josiah Calvin McCracken, 1874-1962, Penn MD ‘01 was a dedicated medical missionary in China for 36 years, an outstanding All-American athlete at Penn in football and track and field, a distinguished University of Pennsylvania alumnus, and a devoted father of eight children and twenty-three grandchildren. “Joe” was born in 1874 in Tennessee, raised in Kansas, and began his college career at Cooper College in Sterling, KS. After transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, he completed five years of study, obtaining his medical degree in 1901 and later completing a surgical internship at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1905.
In 1906 The University of Pennsylvania Christian Association asked Dr. McCracken to visit Canton, China to explore the potential to develop a medical school at that location. He accepted this challenge, and with his new bride Helen, he left to begin what ultimately became a 36-year medical missionary life. After seven busy years in Canton, he moved to Shanghai to become Dean of a newly combined University of Pennsylvania Medical School at St. John’s University from 1914-1942. Under his leadership, the school and faculty educated hundreds of Chinese physicians, many who traveled to the United States for further medical training at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Josiah C. McCracken was beloved and respected by his Chinese colleagues and trainees. As one former student and physician wrote, “few could match him in human heartedness and kind deeds.” Giving the eulogy for Dr. McCracken in 1962, Bishop Y.Y. Tsu said, “he invested all the working years of his long and fruitful life for the advancement of medical education among our people.”
Joe supported his alma mater in many ways including taking his grandchildren to Penn football games. In 1938 he was honored with the Alumni Award of Merit by the Varsity Club, and in 1961 he was named the University’s Distinguished Senior Alumnus.
The McCracken and MacCracken families are proud of their 120+ year association with their alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. Click here to learn more about the McCracken/MacCracken’s longstanding commitment to Penn.
Penn alum Bob Suskind, MD (C59, M63) and his wife, Leslie Lewinter-Suskind, MSS, MFA, have generously endowed an annual award recognizing a Perelman School of Medicine faculty member who exemplifies their lifelong commitment to improving global health and access to care through training partnerships. This prize is a complement to the Robert Suskind, C59, M63 and Leslie Lewinter-Suskind Prize in Global Health for graduating medical students endowed by Bob and Leslie in 2013.
First awarded to a graduating Perelman School of Medicine student in 2014, the Robert Suskind and Leslie Lewinter-Suskind Award in Global Health is awarded to the graduating student who exhibits the greatest intent on helping solve the critical health problems of our fragile planet. It is awarded with gratitude and hope.
ABOUT THE ROBERT SUSKIND AND LESLIE LEWINTER-SUSKIND PRIZE IN GLOBAL HEALTH
Robert Suskind and Leslie Lewinter met in 1962, during Bob’s third year of medical school when, as a Smith-Klein-French fellow, he was to spend the summer in Cameroon. Since the beginning of their marriage, which they spent in the Peace Corps in Senegal, they have lived, worked and travelled together on every continent except Antarctica (so far!), including taking their four children out of school for a year to travel the globe, observing medical care internationally.
Robert Suskind, MD graduated from the University of Pennsylvania College/Wharton ('59) and Medical School ('63). After pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins, he became Field Director of MALAN, an NIH-funded project in Chiang Mai, Thailand, initiating his research on malnutrition's effect on the immune system and the optimal treatment of the malnourished child. His MIT-Boston Children's PhD program in clinical nutrition for pediatricians was pivotal in raising awareness of nutrition’s importance in clinical medicine. Dr. Suskind’s international experiences include Director of the ICDDRB in Bangladesh and advisor to the Patan Academy of Health Sciences in Kathmandu, Nepal. He has been a Chairman of Pediatrics for twenty years and Dean of three medical schools.
Leslie Lewinter-Suskind received her BS from Penn State, an MSS from Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research and an MFA from UNO. After Senegal, she directed an inner-city program under the OEO ("War on Poverty"), followed by a study determining the need for infant care centers in the barriadas of Lima, Peru for Johns Hopkins. As Director of Applied Nutrition at MALAN, she set up follow-up, etiology and intervention studies in childhood malnutrition in the villages surrounding Chiang Mai. At LSU, she directed the International Program for the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics.
ELIGIBILITY
Graduating Penn medical students who will have completed:
- MD/PhD, global health dissertation
- MD/MPH, global health track
- The Global Health Certificate Requirements
- Year-Out research experience in global health
This fund provides financial support to the Perelman School of Medicine Center for Global Health's mission to improve health equity worldwide; through enhanced public health awareness and access to care, discovery and outcomes-based research, and comprehensive educational programs grounded in partnership.
This term fund provides general support for the Botswana & UPenn Partnership and its collaborative work in Botswana to build capacity in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The University of Pennsylvania has worked in Botswana since 2001 and currently employs approximately 120 full-time staff in country working under the name the Botswana-UPenn Partnership. The Botswana-UPenn Partnership works with the Government of Botswana Ministry of Health and the University of Botswana to build healthcare and research capacity in Botswana. Penn is taking a broad interdisciplinary approach to train health-care personnel throughout Botswana in the treatment of HIV/AIDS and its complications, to help develop post-graduate training programs at the University of Botswana with an emphasis on Internal Medicine and its subspecialties, to offer experience in global health to Penn trainees, and to develop joint research programs that address issues relevant to the health and welfare of the citizens of Botswana.Please see the Botswana-UPenn Partnership website for more information.
Questions on Giving
For questions or more information on ways or areas to donate at the Penn PSOM Center for Global Health, please contact:
Mike Hugel
Senior Executive Director of Development
Penn Medicine Development and Alumni Relations
3535 Market Street, Suite 750
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3309
(215) 898-9692 (Office) | (215) 514-9913 (Cell)
hugel@upenn.edu