Professor Alex Jadad appointed Director of the Institute for Global Health Equity and Innovation
February 4/2016
Professor Alejandro (Alex) Jadad is the permanent Director of the Institute for Global Health Equity and Innovation (IGHEI) as of January 1, 2016. His primary institutional home will shift from University Health Network and the Faculty of Medicine to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
“This is an important transition for our community and I’m thrilled that Professor Jadad has joined the Faculty,” said Howard Hu, Dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Jadad is an internationally-recognized leader in improving the capacity of humans to imagine, create and promote new and better approaches to living, healing, working and learning to achieve a full life until the last breath. He also served as a lead co-chair of the School’s Global Health Summit in November 2014.
IGHEI is a university-wide EDU-C based in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health whose vision is a world in which every person and community can have the same opportunities to live a long and healthy life, as part of a sustainable planet.
“IGEHI is a reservoir for contagious ideas for a healthier world. The time has come to unleash a pandemic of health, together,” said Professor Jadad. He also leads the Health of Humanity Initiative, which seeks to answer questions such as: “What is the meaning of health?” “What causes health?” “How healthy are we humans?” “How could health be assessed?” “How could health be created and spread?” “How could every person and community in the world experience good health, no matter what?”
Since joining IGHEI as Interim Director in March 2015, Professor Jadad and his team have created a number of foundational initiatives and projects inspired by the Global Health Summit, which promote greater health equity through social innovation and entrepreneurship. He established Conversations that Matter, a space to be comfortable ‘asking the unasked questions’, making the elephants in the room visible and facing our taboos, to generate unusual, elegant, feasible and viable ways to create and spread health.
Another effort, known as the Good Death Index, explores whether there are conditions that every human being, anywhere in the world, could and should expect to have at the end of life to die well.
In the next few weeks, IGHEI is launching a $200,000 seed funding initiative to support innovative projects aligned with the five subthemes that arose from the Global Health Summit. These, in turn, relate to health systems, the growth of megacities, the convergence of illness patterns across countries, the role of politics, privilege and power in global health inequities, and the potential role of “big data” in advancing the global health equity and innovation agenda.
Professor Jadad is the former Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation. He has led breakthrough initiatives at Xavierian University in Colombia, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom; and McMaster University, University Health Network and the University of Toronto in Canada. As founder and inaugural director of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, he has led major projects that follow a radical ‘glocal’ innovation approach (global and local, at the same time) by identifying and connecting the best minds, the best knowledge and the best tools across traditional boundaries to co-create a healthier, happier and fairer future for all.
To read Professor Jadad’s full biography, please click here.
Follow Professor Jadad on Twitter: @ajadad.