The Stanford-South Africa Biomedical Informatics Program (SSABMI)

With increasing globalization, critical issues in health care are no longer confined to international borders. Diseases can be spread around the world in hours. Low- and middle-income countries bear the highest burden, but medical treatments developed for the the rest of the world may not address the special needs of their population, and they have the lowest research capacity to develop treatments independently. The situation is especially acute in fields such as biomedical informatics, where there is a shortage of faculty world-wide. The Stanford-South Africa Biomedical Informatics (SSABMI) Program's mission is to develop capacity in biomedical informatics by training the next generation of faculty in South Africa. The program seeks to expand the current scope of the field in the Cape Town area by offering classes in special topics, supporting South African candidates who demonstrate exceptional scholarly merit and offering visiting researchers from South Africa the opportunity to join ongoing projects at Stanford University.

Stanford University, the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, and the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (South Africa) have formed a consortium to jointly support the Stanford-South Africa Biomedical Informatics Training Program.

Towards its mission, the Stanford-South Africa Biomedical Informatics Program supports these three activities:

• Expansion of the existing bioinformatics graduate curriculum at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
• Financial support for post-graduate trainees at UWC and UCT.
• Support for Visiting Scholars from South Africa to study at Stanford University or other universities located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The program offers short courses open to post-graduate students or post-docs enrolled in biomedical or bioinformatics studies in South Africa. There is limited space for faculty, post-docs, and graduate students from highly related fields such as biology, medicine, or computer science. Graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty from South Africa may apply for the Visiting Scholarship, which will support biomedical informatics research and studies at Stanford and other universities located in the Bay Area. For details on short courses, training opportunities, and how to apply, please visit the our website http://southafrica.stanford.edu.

SSABMI is funded by The Fogarty International Center, a part of the National Institutes of Health, under grant D43 TW00699.

• Betty Cheng
• Biomedical Informatics Training Program
• Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research
• 251 Campus Drive, MSOB, x-215, MC:5479
• Stanford, CA 94305-5101
• Phone: 650-804-8990
• E-mail: ssabmi-contact@lists.stanford.edu
• http://southafrica.stanford.edu