Hosted in partnership with the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
Medical education programs and university partnerships can play a central role in addressing persistent healthcare workforce shortages and strengthening health system capacity worldwide. This plenary examined how collaborative training models, cross-institutional partnerships, and context-responsive education are helping to expand and sustain the health workforce, particularly in low-resource and underserved settings.
“You can’t partner with a group or an individual you don’t share a vision with. It’s not about doing this job and then part ways. It’s a journey. It’s a long‑term journey.”
– Abebe Bekeleu
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Gastrointestinal Oncologist, MGH Cancer Center; Director, Global Cancer Care Program, Massachusetts General Hospital; Program Director, GI Oncology, Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute
Dr. Aparna Parikh is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a gastrointestinal oncologist at the MGH Cancer Center. She leads the Colorectal Medical Oncology Research and Young Adults Colorectal Cancer programs and is internationally renowned for her expertise on gastrointestinal cancers and work in liquid biopsy and ctDNA. She is the co‑founder and CEO/Chief Scientist of Reversing Early Recurrence and serves as Director of the MGH Global Cancer Care Program, and Co-Director of the GI Cancer Program at the MGB Cancer Institute. Dr. Parikh is a respected clinician, researcher and advocate for equitable cancer care worldwide.
Professor of Medicine, University of California San Francisco (UCSF); Co-Founder and Faculty Director, HEAL Initiative
Dr. Sriram Shamasunder is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative, a health workforce strengthening fellowship working in Navajo Nation and 9 countries around the world. Over the last nine years, HEAL has grown to include over 270 fellows, half of whom are Native American or from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Dr. Shamasunder was named the Young Physician of the Year in 2010 by the Northern California Chapter of the American College of Physicians and was named an Asia21 Fellow by the Asia Society in 2012, a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar to India in 2012, and a Draper Richards Kaplan Entrepreneur in 2016. He was an Emerson Dial Fellow in 2021 and received the UCSF Chancellor’s Edison T. Uno Award for Public Service in 2023. Sri is a published poet who studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People while at UC Berkeley. Dr. Shamasunder is interested in the role of solidarity in elevating untold stories and advancing health equity. In 2016, he gave a Berkeley TEDx talk entitled “Whose Suffering Matters Less, and Why?”
Deputy Vice Chancellor of Academic and Research Affairs, Founding Dean, School of Medicine, University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda
Abebe Bekele, MD, PhD, FCS (ECSA), FACS, FRCS(Ed), MAMSE, is Deputy Vice Chancellor of Academic and Research Affairs and founding Dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda. He has served as the CEO of the Black Lion Teaching Hospital and Dean of the School of Medicine at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. He is a Full Professor of Surgery (General and Thoracic Surgery), and holds full professorial faculty positions at UGHE, Addis Ababa University, and the University of Rwanda, as well as a professorship in global health at Duke University in the USA. He has over 26 years of experience in medical and surgical education, and he is a fellow of both the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Master Surgical Educators of the American College of Surgeons. Professor Abebe is the Secretary General of the College of Surgeons of East Central and Southern Africa (COSECSA). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the East and Central Africa Journal of Surgery and sits on the editorial board of the JAMA Health Forum, BMC Medical Education, and the Ethiopian Medical Journal. He is also the founder and the secretary-general of the Consortium of Medical Schools of Africa (COMSA). Professor Abebe is actively engaged in Global Safe Surgery and has served as a senior advisor to the Federal Ministry of Health, Ethiopia, in the Saving Lives Through Safe Surgery initiative. He is the founder and current chairman of the Pan African Surgical HealthCare Forum (PASHeF). His research interests include trauma, surgical oncology, equity in global surgery, and education.
Co-Director, Harvard Center for AIDS Research; Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Division of Infectious Diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr. Ingrid V. Bassett is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Infectious Disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has over 20 years of experience leading clinical research in South Africa with the goal of improving HIV care and prevention for people living at the center of the global HIV epidemic. She is the Co-Director of the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research, which provides research, training, and educational opportunities for early-stage investigators. She is also the recipient of an NIH K24 award that supports her role as a research mentor; she has mentored >30 US- and Africa-based investigators. Dr. Bassett graduated from Harvard Medical School and was an Internal Medicine Resident and Chief Medical Resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital before training in Infectious Disease at the joint Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham and Women’s Hospital program. She also earned an MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Bassett was the winner of the 2015 HIV Medicine Association Research Award.
At the 2026 Global Health Symposium, hosted by the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) on April 16, policymakers, practitioners, academics, and students gathered around a central idea: achieving global health equity in an age of scarcity requires moving from fragmented systems to shared responsibility.
