Dr. Nicole Szlezák :: Sustainability Science Program :: Center for International Development

Sustainability Science Program

Dr. Nicole Szlezák
Center for International Development
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
404B Rubenstein Building
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
Tel: (1) 617-496-5947
Fax: (1) 617-496-8753
Email: nszlezak "at" fas.harvard.edu
Group affiliation: Doctoral Fellow

Nicole Szlez�k is a Doctoral Fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard�s Center for International Development and a doctoral candidate in the Public Policy Program at Harvard University. Her work focuses on institutions and governance in global health. Her dissertation investigates the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria�s evolution, institutional design and role in the recent changes in Chinese Aids policy. She is also interested in institutional arrangements to foster drug development and delivery for diseases that receive little attention in terms of research and development. These include infectious diseases that mainly affect developing countries (the so-called �neglected diseases� such as malaria, TB and river blindness) as well as rare diseases that occur in many locations (so-called �orphan diseases�). Together with William Clark, Szlez�k leads the Institutional Innovations for Linking Knowledge with Action in Global Health Project which focuses on institutions in international collaboration and coordination in global health, with a particular focus on lessons from the field of malaria prevention and control. Prior to coming to Harvard, Szlez�k was a clinical researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Tuebingen, Germany, and at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Gabon, where her work focused on malaria and schistosomiasis. Szlez�k holds a medical degree from Humboldt University in Berlin, and a Dr. med. degree from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. She graduated from the Master in Public Administration Program at Harvard�s Kennedy School of Government.

Institutional Innovations for Linking Knowledge with Action in Global Health. Important changes are taking place in the global health arena that can have important implications for the gap between knowledge and action that has long been a concern in the field. Since the late 1990s, a host of new organizations have emerged, and relationships between existing players have been changed in ways that are opening up new opportunities for better integrating research and development with the needs of health delivery programs. However, as the new and reoriented actors concentrate on accomplishing their various individual missions, less attention is being paid to the architecture and effectiveness of the institutional arrangements linking them. The result is almost certainly a failure to exploit fully the opportunities presented by the new actors and arrangements. This project uses the rich experience from the field of malaria as a starting point for examining the evolution of global health institutional architectures. Our goal is to learn lessons, from the successes and failures evident in that evolution, for improving the institutional foundations of international efforts to grapple with not only the long-standing challenge of malaria but with other threats to global health in a rapidly developing world.