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Coffee Sessions
Coffee Sessions
Event Series Coffee Sessions

Leveraging Partnerships to Improve the Health of Young People Living with HIV in Peru

This event will showcase the essential role of partnerships in designing and evaluating interventions for young people affected by HIV in Peru by spotlighting the successful partnership between Dr. Molly Franke, Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Renato Errea, Head of the HIV Program at Socios En Salud. Our speakers will describe the tangible impact their work has had on improving access to HIV care for Peruvian adolescents and will offer valuable insights into how they have navigated complex challenges through a bidirectional partnership. About the HGHI Coffee Sessions The HGHI Coffee Sessions Virtual Series takes place on the last Friday of each month from 9:00 AM – 9:45 AM Eastern Time. Showcasing global health researchers and practitioners from Harvard and beyond, this series aims to explore the role of partnership and collaboration when working to advance global health equity. A diverse range of topics will be covered; including climate change and health, global health security, mental healthcare, reproductive healthcare access, financing and governance for global health, healthcare in conflict areas, digital health, and more. This series will take place online over Zoom, and all sessions will be recorded and available on HGHI’s YouTube Channel. About our Speakers Molly Franke, SD, Associate Professor and Epidemiologist, Global Health Research Core, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Dr. Molly Franke is an epidemiologist and Associate Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. For nearly 20 years she has collaborated with Socios En Salud on research to improve the health of children and adolescents affected by TB and HIV. Her current intervention work includes studies to reduce stigma and improve the well-being of adolescents and young adults living with HIV through the provision of community-based accompaniment and youth-friendly modalities, such as music videos and social media. Renato Errea, MD, MMSc, Head, HIV Program, Socios En Salud Dr. Renato Errea is a Peruvian physician researcher with nearly a decade of experience conducting global health research and interventions focused on people affected by HIV and other vulnerable populations in Peru. Dr. Errea is the Head of the HIV Program at the Peruvian non-governmental organization Socios En Salud. In this role, he leads interventions and studies focused on facilitating access to comprehensive care to the communities most affected by HIV and other prioritized populations in the context of HIV (adolescents and migrants), in Peru.
Research and Innovation Speaker Series
Research and Innovation Speaker Series

Innovation in the Treatment of Drug-resistant Tuberculosis: The endTB Clinical Trial

LEARN MORE/REGISTER In this Global Health Research and Innovations Speaker Series event, Dr. Carole Diane Mitnick, ScD, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School will share her work on the endTB clinical trial. Dr. Louise C. Ivers, MD, MPH, DTM&H, Faculty Director at the Harvard Global Health Institute, will moderate the conversation. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER Event Description For decades, poor treatment options and low-quality evidence plagued care for rifampin-resistant tuberculosis (RR-TB). The advent of new anti-TB drugs and enhanced funding now permit randomized controlled trials of shortened, all-oral treatment for resistant TB. Methods endTB is an international, open-label, Phase 3 non-inferiority, randomized, controlled clinical trial to compare five 9-month all-oral regimens including bedaquiline (B), delamanid (D), linezolid (L), levofloxacin (Lfx) or moxifloxacin (M), clofazimine (C) and pyrazinamide (Z), to the standard (control) for treatment of fluoroquinolone-susceptible RR-TB. Participants were randomized to 9BLMZ, 9BCLLfxZ, 9BDLLfxZ, 9DCLLfxZ, 9DCMZ and control using Bayesian response-adaptive randomization. The primary outcome was favorable outcome at week 73 defined by two negative sputum culture results or by favorable bacteriologic, clinical, and radiologic evolution. The non-inferiority margin was 12 percentage points. Results Of 754 randomized patients, 696 and 559 were included in the modified intention to treat (mITT) and per-protocol (PP) analyses, respectively. In mITT, the control had 80.7% favorable outcomes. Regimens 9BCLLfxZ [adjusted risk difference (aRD): 9.5% (95% confidence interval (CI), 0.4 to 18.6)], 9BLMZ [aRD: 8.8% (95%CI, -0.6 to 18.2)], and 9BDLLfxZ [3.9% (95%CI, -5.8 to 13.6)] were non-inferior in mITT and in PP. The proportion of participants experiencing grade 3 or higher adverse events was similar across the regimens. Grade 3 or higher hepatotoxicity occurred in 11.7% of the experimental regimens overall and in 7.1% of the control. Conclusions The endTB trial increases treatment options for RR-TB with three shortened, all-oral regimens that were non-inferior to a current well-performing standard of care. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER About the Speakers Carole Diane Mitnick, ScD, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Dr. Mitnick is Professor of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. She has 25 years of experience in programmatic support, research (observational and experimental), policy, and advocacy related to increased access to high-quality, appropriate treatment for TB, especially for drug-resistant TB. Dr. Mitnick works in close collaboration with Partners In Health, specifically in Peru, Haiti, Kazakhstan, and Lesotho. In addition to teaching at HMS and giving lectures at other institutions, Dr. Mitnick mentors trainees in the HMS Master of Medical Science in Global Health Delivery Program. She is the co-PI of the endTB and endTB-Q trials, two multi-country, Phase III, randomized, controlled, clinical trials of all-oral, shortened, novel regimens for rifampin-resistant TB. She has also recently begun conducting research on post-TB lung disease. Louise C. Ivers, MD, MPH, DTM&H, Faculty Director, Harvard Global Health Institute; Executive Director, Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health Dr. Louise C. Ivers, MD, MPH, DTM&H is the Faculty Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and the Executive Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Global Health. Dr. Ivers is also the David Bangsberg Endowed Chair in Global Health Equity at MGH and a Professor of Medicine and Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ivers has spent her career providing care to the rural and urban poor and engaging in patient-oriented investigation that offer solutions to barriers to healthcare. She works on the design, implementation, and evaluation of large-scale public health programs in resource-limited settings with the goal of achieving health equity. She has worked on healthcare delivery in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. From 2003-2017, Dr. Ivers served in various leadership roles for Partners in Health, including Clinical Director, Chief of mission, and Director of strategic implementation. In addition to expanding access to healthcare for the poor, Dr. Ivers has contributed to published research articles on HIV/AIDS, food insecurity, and cholera treatment and prevention and is involved in global policy and advocacy. About the Global Health Research and Innovation Speaker Series The Harvard Global Health Institute’s Global Health Research and Innovation Speaker Series showcases the latest scholarly and scientific advancements in global health across Harvard and beyond, to make cutting-edge research accessible to a diverse global audience, and to spark innovative solutions in the pursuit of health equity and improved health outcomes worldwide. The public series takes place virtually on the second Tuesday of each month from 12:00 to 12:45 pm ET. Each session will include a presentation by a featured speaker showcasing their innovative research in global health, followed by a moderated Q&A. Speakers will share their own perspectives; they do not speak for the university.

Coffee Sessions
leadership
tech and health
Coffee Sessions
leadership
tech and health

Better Evidence, Better Training, Better Care: Supporting current and future clinicians in Africa to use evidence-based digital tools

This session will explore the partnerships and people that enable Better Evidence at Ariadne Labs to support the frontline health workforce to make the best decisions when and where it matters most. Through 108 local Champions, the Better Evidence for Training program is facilitating access to digital tools for nearly 90,000 students and faculty at more than 59 medical schools across 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

2024 Global Health Symposium

The Harvard Global Health Institute’s annual Global Health Symposium provides the opportunity for faculty, staff, and students across Harvard’s schools, institutes, centers, departments, and affiliated hospitals, as well as an international community of health professionals, academics, and civil society, to connect and engage in meaningful conversations around some of the most pressing global health issues in an inclusive hybrid experience. Read more on our 2024 Global Health Symposium webpage.
climate change
fellowship
student engagement
climate change
fellowship
student engagement

Pathways to Global Health: Climate Change and Health

42 Church Street, Cambridge, MA, United States
Join us for this informal in-person session for Harvard undergraduates to connect with our current 2023 HGHI Burke Climate and Health Fellows, Annikki Herranen-Tabibi, PhD, and Jenny Lee, PhD. Learn about their career journeys in the intersection of climate change and health — over pizzas and soft drinks! Annikki Herranen-Tabibi (she/her) is a medical and environmental anthropologist of the Circumpolar Arctic. She is engaged in long-term ethnographic research in Sápmi, the transborder homeland of the Indigenous Sámi people. Her scholarly work defines a space for research and collaborative action at the intersections of global health with medical and environmental humanities and social sciences. Across these arenas, her work is grounded in questions of care – interpersonal, intergenerational, and ecological. Jenny Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health . She received an M.S. in Biostatistics from Yale University and received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Harvard University. Her work has focused on assessing the health impacts of air pollution on vulnerable populations, including pregnant women, children, and the elderly, with an aim to find policy implications that provide actionable insights for policymakers. Her research focuses on developing statistical methods for assessing the impact of exposure to multi-pollutant mixtures during pregnancy on high-dimensional epigenetic markers in newborns, and developing causal inference methods for clustered data in environmental health to assess effects of air pollution on socioeconomically disadvantaged children and elderly in the U.S.
Research and Innovation Speaker Series
Research and Innovation Speaker Series

Global Health Research and Innovation Speaker Series with Milind Tambe

Virtual: Zoom
For over 15 years, Dr. Tambe and his team have been focused on AI for social impact, deploying end-to-end systems in areas of public health, conservation, and public safety. In this talk, he will highlight the results from their deployments for social impact in public health, as well as required innovations in integrating machine learning and optimization. Dr. Tambe will present recent results from their work in India with the world’s two largest mobile health programs for maternal and childcare that have served millions of beneficiaries, and on-going projects focused on other mobile health programs. Additionally, he will highlight results from an earlier project on HIV prevention among youth experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles. To address challenges of ML+optimization common to all of these applications, Dr. Tambe and his team have advanced the state of the art in decision-focused learning, restless multi-armed bandits and influence maximization in social networks. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER   About Milind Tambe, PhD, MSc Dr. Milind Tambe is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University; concurrently, he is also Principal Scientist and Director for “AI for Social Good” at Google Research. Dr. Tambe is a recipient of the AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, AAAI Feigenbaum Prize, IJCAI John McCarthy Award, AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award, AAMAS ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award, INFORMS Wagner prize for excellence in Operations Research practice, Military Operations Research Society Rist Prize, and the Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award. Dr. Tambe is a fellow of AAAI and ACM. Dr. Tambe’s work focuses on advancing AI and multiagent systems for public health, conservation, and public safety, with a track record of building pioneering AI systems for social impact. You can read more about Dr. Milind Tambe on his website, X, LinkedIn, and Facebook.   About the Global Health Research and Innovation Speaker Series The Harvard Global Health Institute’s Global Health Research and Innovation Speaker Series showcases the latest scholarly and scientific advancements in global health across Harvard and beyond, to make cutting-edge research accessible to a diverse global audience, and to spark innovative solutions in the pursuit of health equity and improved health outcomes worldwide. The public series takes place virtually on the second Tuesday of each month from 12:00 to 12:45 pm ET. Each session will include a presentation by a featured speaker showcasing their innovative research in global health, followed by a moderated Q&A. Speakers will share their own perspectives; they do not speak for Harvard. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
fellowship
leadership
fellowship
leadership

Empowering Healthier Communities: How Health Promotion Research Can Advance the Philippines’ Universal Health Care Journey

MA, United States
Featuring Katherine Ann V. Reyes, MD, MPP, LEAD fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Thursday, April 4th, 1:00 – 2:00 PM ET (Hybrid) 665 Huntington Avenue, Building 1, Room 1208, Boston, MA 02115 and via Zoom To attend a hybrid seminar in-person, a Harvard ID is required to access the building. For questions, please contact Jessica Majano jmajanoguevara@hsph.harvard.edu. Dr. Katherine Ann Reyes is a licensed Philippine physician and holds a Master of Public Policy from the National University of Singapore. She was recently appointed Program Lead to establish the Institute of Health Promotion at the National Institutes of Health University of the Philippines Manila, a key component in the implementation of the country’s UHC Law. She co-founded the Alliance for Improving Health Outcomes (AIHO), a local non-profit public health organization that has worked to improve opportunities for aspiring professionals in their field. She served as an inaugural member of the Philippine Health Technology Assessment Council and the UP Manila Committee of Research Integrity. She was also the first Board Member for the Western Pacific Region at Health Systems Global, where she helped to formalize the society’s expansion work in the region. Further, Dr. Reyes is a founding member of the Philippine Society of Public Health Physicians and a co-convener of Women in Global Health Philippines. In recognition of her work, Dr. Reyes was awarded the Gawad Lagablab for Social Upliftment by the Philippine Science High School National Alumni Association in 2021.   Speakers’ remarks are based on their own scholarship and experience. As such, they speak for themselves, not for Harvard.

Pathways to Global Health with Shela Sridhar, MD, MPH

42 Church Street, Cambridge, MA, United States
Join us for this informal in-person session for Harvard undergraduates to connect with our current 2023 HGHI Burke Global Health Fellow, Shela Sridhar, MD, MPH. Learn about her career journey in global health over pizzas and soft drinks! Shela Sridhar is a 2023 HGHI Burke Global Health Fellow. She is an internal medicine and pediatrics-trained physician working as a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). She completed a Global Health Service Delivery Fellowship at BCH where she worked on health system strengthening initiatives.

Educating Future Global Health Practitioners in One of the Most Remote Places in the World

42 Church Street, Cambridge, MA, United States
In-person event. Available to Harvard Undergraduate Students only. In-person capacity is limited and available on a first come first serve basis. The Harvard Global Health Institute  is pleased to welcome Dr. Mangal Rawal, Vice Chancellor of Karnali Academy of Health Sciences (KAHS), a medical university in one of the most remote areas of the world, to Harvard’s campus on Wednesday, February 28th. In this interactive event, Dr. Rawal will discuss rural health equity and share the mission, achievements, operations, and challenges of running a medical university in a remote region. The conversation will be moderated by Pradish Poudel, MD, graduate student in Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School. Students will get insider knowledge about health equity in rural areas such as Karnali, Nepal, and gain insight on the challenges and inner workings of health organizations like KAHS. Karnali Academy of Health Sciences (KAHS) is a medical university established by the government of Nepal to enable access to quality healthcare services and education at an affordable cost for the people of under resourced areas in Jumla. Dr Rawal, the Vice Chancellor of KAHS, has played a pivotal role in establishing and advancing the organization, setting an example for how to successfully operate a medical university in one of the most remote areas of the world. Mangal Rawal, MD, MPA was born in a remote village of the Karnali Province in Nepal. He defied the odds to pursue education, completing traditional schooling in his village before advancing for further studies. Despite limited resources, he obtained his MBBS/MD from BPKIHS and Residency in Orthopedics from NAMS, Kathmandu, both on government scholarships. Following this, he pursued an AOA Fellowship in Trauma in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and earned a master’s in public administration (MPA) from Tribhuvan University. Recognized for his dedication to rural health, he was appointed as the Vice Chancellor of Karnali Academy of Health Sciences (KAHS) by then Prime Minister of Nepal, becoming the youngest Vice Chancellor in Nepalese history. His tenure witnessed groundbreaking initiatives, including establishing undergraduate and postgraduate medical education programs in a remote medical school. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his leadership as the hospital director of KAHS earned him the prestigious President’s Medal for extraordinary contributions. Driven by a vision to transform KAHS into a center of excellence for rural health, medicinal herbs research, and mountain medicine, Dr. Rawal remains committed to serving the communities of Karnali with clinical expertise and social advocacy.
special projects
special projects

Power and Money in Global Health: A conversation with Tim Schwab about “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire”

MA, United States
In this interactive, hybrid event, Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, PhD, will moderate a conversation with investigative journalist and author Tim Schwab about his latest book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire. Audiences, both in-person and online, will have the opportunity to join in the discussion. This event is part of HGHI’s Scholarly Working Group Initiative. It is being co-hosted by the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and in partnership with the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School.   To join the event virtually, please click here to register   In earlier eras, the super-wealthy—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick and the like—were denominated as “robber barons”. They were pilloried by the popular news media and investigated in some situations. But that is not the case with Bill Gates, who has been lauded for his philanthropy in global health. Based on investigative journalist, Tim Schwab’s, exhaustively researched new book, this event will take a closer look at Bill Gates’ approach to global health, and what has come to be called “philanthrocapitalism.” The rise of philanthrocapitalism is tied to a shift in thinking about development and the role of the state in global health governance. Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are worthy of particular focus because their investments dwarf those of other private foundations. The Gates Foundation’s investments in global health rival those of top donor countries; Gates himself played an outsized role in influencing the selection of the COVAX facility for COVID-19 vaccines as opposed to the COVID-19-Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) housed under the World Health Organization. The Gates Foundation, on the one hand, sets agendas for global health, and on the other is not subject to accountability for the actions implemented, the means and metrics used, nor the priorities set. Many academic researchers at top teaching and research institutions, including Harvard University, rely on Gates money for their research priorities; Gates funding and the paradigm of metrics they espouse have also had deep impacts on the curricula in global public health, and in turn on the sorts of candidates sought and the skills they will have upon graduation. As governments increasingly are unable or unwilling to invest in health as a global public good, private philanthropies such as Gates can create institutions, set agendas, and shape development in ways that were inconceivable only a matter of decades ago.   About Tim Schwab Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC. His groundbreaking reporting on the Gates Foundation for The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, and The British Medical Journal has been honored with an Izzy Award and a Deadline Club Award. The Bill Gates Problem is his first book. The New York Times recently highlighted his forthcoming book (Henry Holt Books), The Bill Gates Problem, as one to look out for in November; Booklist (American Library Association) gave it a starred review; and Kirkus called it an “An eye-opening look at the use of tax-subsidized money by private philanthropy.” The book builds on an investigative series I published in 2020 and 2021, which was funded through an Alicia Patterson reporting fellowship. This series won an Izzy Prize (from Ithaca College) and a Deadline Club Award (from the Society of Professional Journalists), and was a finalist for a Mirror Award (from Syracuse University). The Nation nominated his series on Gates for a Pulitzer. His reporting on Gates has appeared in The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, and the British Medical Journal, and represents some of the only investigative journalism ever published on Gates. You can read more about Tim Schwab on his website.     About Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, PhD Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, PhD, is a Lecturer on Law and the Senior Fellow on Global Health and Rights at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School; Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; and Senior Advisor on Human Rights and Health Policy at the global health justice organization, Partners In Health. Known globally for her trans-disciplinary work in relation to economic and social rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights, the right to health, and the intersections between development paradigms and human rights, Yamin’s career has bridged academia and activism. She has lived in Latin America and East Africa for much of her professional life and worked with local advocacy organizations, including co-founding a program on health and human rights in the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos (Lima, Peru; 1999). Yamin was appointed by the UN Secretary General as one of ten international experts to the Independent Accountability Panel for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health in the Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2021). She was the chief consultant to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and drafter of the ‘Technical guidance on the application of a human-rights based approach to the implementation of policies and programmes to reduce preventable maternal morbidity and mortality’, the first guidance on a ‘human rights-based approach to health’ to be adopted by the UN Human Rights Council. Yamin holds Juris Doctor and Master’s in Public Health degrees from Harvard University, and a Doctorate in Law from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She has published multiple books and over 160 articles in law and policy journals, as well as peer-reviewed public health journals, in both English and Spanish. A revised and substantially expanded edition of her latest monograph, When Misfortune becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, is out from Stanford University Press in 2023. You can read more about Alicia Ely Yamin on her faculty page.     About the Harvard Global Health Institute The Harvard Global Health Institute is an interfaculty initiative that facilitates collaboration across the Harvard community and partners worldwide to advance global health equity. We tackle the greatest health challenges of our time through innovative transdisciplinary research, education, and partnerships that build knowledge and drive positive change in global health. Our work is grounded in the fact that researchers, scholars, care deliverers, and communities must inform each others’ work to transform global health at every level.   About the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School was founded in 2005 through a generous gift from Joseph H. Flom and the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation. The Center’s founding mission was to promote interdisciplinary analysis and legal scholarship in these fields. Today, the Center has grown into a leading research program dedicated to the unbiased legal and ethical analysis of pressing questions facing health policymakers, medical professionals, patients, families, and others who influence and are influenced by health care and the health care system.   About the HGHI Scholarly Working Group The Harvard Global Health Institute’s Scholarly Working Groups are designed to encourage a collaborative environment, promote inter-faculty gatherings, and explore and accelerate research areas in topics critical to the advancement of “Health for All”. Each Scholarly Working Group includes faculty from at least two schools across Harvard University. Through these working groups, we aim to catalyze ideas, inspire the writing of grants, policy briefs, or working papers, or build networks to advance a program of work. Through our events and programs, the Harvard Global Health Institute provides a platform for different perspectives and debates within the field of global health through a variety of media. The views expressed in these events and programs are solely those of the speakers, authors, researchers, and participating audience, and do not imply endorsement by the Harvard Global Health Institute.

GHP Thursday Brown Bag Series with Marie Roseline Belizaire

Virtual: Zoom
This event will feature Marie Roseline Belizaire, 2023 LEAD fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute. Topic: What we know and don’t know on how to effectively engage the community in health security Hosted by the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Thursday Brown Bag Series features current research of members and affiliates of GHP.  The intent is to educate and raise the awareness of our community and beyond, about the research activities presently being conducted by faculty, students, researchers, and special guests of the department.

GHP Thursday Brown Bag Series with Brenda Kateera

Virtual: Zoom
This event will feature Brenda Kateera, 2023 LEAD fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute. Topic: From Healing Hills to Healthcare for All: Rwanda’s Inspiring Path to Universal Coverage Hosted by the Department of Global Health and Population (GHP) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Thursday Brown Bag Series features current research of members and affiliates of GHP.  The intent is to educate and raise the awareness of our community and beyond, about the research activities presently being conducted by faculty, students, researchers, and special guests of the department.