The European Alliance for Global Health – Transformation through joint Research and Innovation Action (EUGLOHRIA) was officially launched during an official online kick-off meeting on January 19, 2021.
Rectors/Presidents and Vice-presidents, faculty and staff from all consortium members and representatives from the European Commission's Research Executive Agency (REA) attended the meeting, organised and hosted virtually by Université Paris-Saclay.
Building on EUGLOHs education and mobility dimension, EUGLOHRIA expands the Alliance's scope to include research, innovation and societal development. This project aims to set in motion an innovative joint agenda of institutional transformation towards harmonizing research and innovation efforts around the spectrum of global health. It also seeks to strengthen the collaboration within the Alliance and serve as best practice model for projects to follow.
The establishment and assessment of common practices based on the identification and sharing of features and elements of each individual ecosystem will be of pivotal importance for EUGLOHRIA. In order to achieve this, the efforts of EUGLOHRIA will revolve around specific objectives focusing on a multidisciplinary approach to crises, the creation of shared research infrastructures and the strategic situation of the Alliance and its members within highly dynamic innovation ecosystems.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made evident the importance of interdisciplinary global health approaches to tackle the societal challenges that such crises pose. In this context, EUGLOHRIA addresses the urgent need to step up collaboration in research and innovation by consolidating and expanding cross-national research and innovation networks to include actors from areas different than academia. It thus promotes Academia-Business cooperations and actively engages other policy and societal actors. This is in line with the challenges and scope of a project framed within the "Science with and for Society" call.
The proposed approaches include the development of an action plan in research on pandemics, the establishment of "Network of Excellence Core Facilities" (ECF) and an action plan for the "EUGLOH Observatory of Global Health". This measures should allow the endeavour to be adequately assimilated by policymakers, business and society. Thereby, EUGLOHRIA will guarantee a certain level of sustainability of the envisioned institutional transformation agenda by promoting excellence in the next generation of global health experts.