Applications Open Now

PI: Chibueze Amanchukwu, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

Partner Organization: University of Nigeria, Nsukka

Proposal: Grand global challenges ranging from energy to health require global approaches and global talent. The lack of resources has stymied the growth of research in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the lack of research experiences has prevented high-achieving undergraduates from Nigerian universities from pursuing PhDs at top research institutions. We propose to expand our virtual program, Research Experience for Nigerian Undergraduates (RENEU). UChicago Global was pivotal in supporting the first year of the program in 2023. We will expand the program with this funding by increasing the number of supported students and hosting the RENEU workshop at additional Nigeria locations beyond Lagos. The RENEU program pairs top undergraduate students to perform summer research under the guidance of a US-based faculty member. Through this research experience, we equip these students with the research and professional skills to become successful PhD students. Finally, we will host an in-person RENEU workshop in Nigeria where (1) RENEU students present their research projects and garner presentation skills, (2) UChicago faculty present their research, and (3) students are equipped with the relevant skills to submit competitive applications for PhD programs. Providing research opportunities to high-achieving students showcases research as a possible career choice while providing them with the experiences and resources needed to excel as PhD students. UChicago engagement with the region also exposes our faculty to the Sub-Saharan Africa region and vice versa, and provides access to world-class talent.

PI: Kavi Bhalla, Department of Public Health Sciences

Partner Organizations: South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC)

Proposal: We propose to host a workshop in Cape Town to support initiating a collaboration between UChicago and key African institutions focused on strengthening the use of evidence in road safety policy and decision-making. Reducing the burden of traffic injuries in Africa requires durable platforms that connect epidemiologists, data producers, transportation researchers, and policymakers across institutions and regions. Although relevant data sources and analytical expertise are increasingly available, these remain fragmented and weakly connected to policy processes. Our workshop will bring these groups together around a shared vision of evidence-based safety policy. This initiative builds on our prior work in using imperfect data systems to construct policy-relevant metrics in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We currently have an ongoing project supported by UChicago's Kiphart Center for Global Health to train LMIC researchers in the use of case-control studies for evaluating crash risks, which will culminate in a workshop at the 16th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion (Safety 2026) in Cape Town, where 12 studies will be presented, including four led by Africa-based researchers. With PGFA support, we propose to expand these research-focused capacity-building efforts to explicitly support the use of data in regulatory policy. In addition to our planned case-control workshop, we will organize a one-day, policy-focused workshop at Safety 2026 in partnership with the South African Medical Research Council, the sub-Saharan Africa Road Safety Observatory, and collaborators from the Global Burden of Disease Study. The workshop will focus on using existing data sources to (1) support advocacy for increased resources for road safety programs and (2) improve the alignment of regulatory efforts with crash risks using vehicle design regulation as a case study.

PI: Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Department of Anthropology

Partner Organizations: Harvard University (Kennedy School of Government), McQuillan Institute for Science, Technology and the Human Future, Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) / Columbia University, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), Constitutional Court of South Africa, Stellenbosch University Law School, University of the Witwatersrand, Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg)

Proposal: In a time of global democratic backsliding, marked by a collapse of trust in liberal institutions and Enlightenment rationality, there is an urgent need to reimagine the shared norms and values that underwrite global governance. This requires constitutional imaginations beyond the nation state. We propose a South African convening as part of a multiyear, multidisciplinary, transnational project, "A Constitution for the Human Future." The larger project includes six convenings over a two-to-three-year period in sites of world historical constitutional significance. The South African convening will foreground the features of the "transformative [post-apartheid] constitution" which made socioeconomic emancipation a foundational premise of the nation's new political order. The overall project recognizes that rapid developments in science and technology, unmoored from deliberation and oversight, are driving contemporary crises of governance worldwide. It centers human health, datafication, and climate change as vital sites of global constitutional (re)imagination. Technologies such as AI are changing the very definition of publics and reasoning, while gene editing puts the meaning of the human—and geoengineering the conception of the planet—at stake. The project will produce multimodal outcomes (deliberative, textual, and artistic) that articulate new constitutional imaginaries going beyond traditional conceptions of civil and political rights.

PI: Monica Peek, Department of Medicine

Partner Organizations: Lagos State University

Proposal: DATICAN—which stands for "Data Science and Medical Image Analysis Training for Improved Health Care Delivery in Nigeria"—is a collaborative effort amongst Lagos State University, The University of Ibadan, Redeemer's University, and The University of Chicago. DATICAN's overarching objective is to produce a new generation of interdisciplinary data scientists possessing the necessary clinical and data science skills to become the translational research leaders needed to improve healthcare delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A $6M NIH grant (2023–2026) has provided funds to train approximately 70 Nigerian scientists in using Artificial Intelligence and Data Science technology for solving medical problems in Nigeria. So far, 60 participants have graduated and published about 15 papers, and DATICAN participants are now equipped with the knowledge of AI. However, they have limited knowledge of the ethical issues surrounding AI deployment. To address this, the Center for Innovation in Global Health within BSD (CIGH) provided grant support in 2025 to partner with the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics to: (1) bring 5 DATICAN professors for the Summer Intensive Course at the MacLean Center, and (2) support 6 UChicago physician ethicists to travel to Nigeria in March 2026 for a Train-the-Trainer workshop. By developing interdisciplinary groups of trainers, we hope to develop a sustainable path for this work to continue in Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan African countries. The goal of the Provost Faculty Scholars grant is to support a second cohort of UChicago physicians traveling to Nigeria in 2027 to conduct another intensive ethics training program, as it is more cost-efficient and scalable to train Nigerian scholars in Nigeria than to bring small cohorts at a time to the US.

PI: Blase Ur, Department of Computer Science

Partner Organizations: Carnegie Mellon University Africa (CMU-Africa)

Proposal: This project aims to improve the security and privacy of mobile money (MoMo) payment systems widely used in Rwanda, as well as across East Africa. When a customer pays a merchant using MoMo, both the customer and merchant receive confirmation messages on their phones over SMS. However, due to a variety of practical constraints, merchants often simply inspect the customer's confirmation message on the customer's (untrusted) phone, potentially enabling fraud. The joint UChicago and CMU-Africa team will develop and prototype novel payment-confirmation workflows that improve security for the merchant and privacy for the customer. The team will evaluate the security and usability of the proposed methods through a human-subjects study of Rwandan business owners and employees.

PI: Obianuju Madueke-Laveaux, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology

Partner Organizations: Fibroid Foundation Africa

Proposal: Uterine fibroids are among the most common tumors affecting women of African descent, yet their true population-level prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa remains poorly defined. In Ghana, existing estimates rely largely on hospital-based data and likely underestimate disease burden by excluding women without access to diagnostic imaging and those relying on non-conventional treatment methods. This project will generate a community-based, ultrasound-confirmed estimate of uterine fibroid prevalence among reproductive-age women in three defined Ghanaian districts. We will conduct a cross-sectional study using household-based sampling to recruit women aged 18–50 years. Participants will complete a brief interviewer-administered survey assessing demographics, symptoms, and prior access to gynecologic care. A subset of participants will undergo standardized transabdominal pelvic ultrasound using mobile imaging equipment to confirm the presence of fibroids. The primary outcome will be the point prevalence of ultrasound-detected uterine fibroids in the study population. This pilot project will provide rigorous preliminary data on fibroid prevalence using gold-standard imaging in a community setting. Findings will inform future large-scale studies and support evidence-based advocacy for improved diagnostic access for women's reproductive health in Ghana.

PI: Anne Karing, Department of Economics

Partner Organizations: Research and Adaptive Monitoring Lab (RAMLabs)

Proposal: Individuals in low-income countries (LICs) face a variety of health challenges, including disease exposure, comorbidities, and limited formal treatment options. This study will collect detailed survey data on the full range of individuals' symptoms and their treatment options and choices. In partnership with local health experts and governmental boards, we will recruit 3,000 individuals riding public buses in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and conduct telephone surveys 4–7 days post-recruitment. We will use a combination of local doctors' case analysis and artificial intelligence to classify the symptoms into potential conditions and assess the appropriateness of the treatments the patients have received. The data collection will include random variation in patients' exposure, on the bus, to unlicensed vendors—known as marketers—who sell medicines. In addition to an academic paper, the work will result in a survey dataset that provides unique coverage of individuals' symptoms and treatments. The data can guide policymakers and local health organizations toward a better understanding of chronic and acute disease prevalence and how patients are managing their conditions by accessing formal and informal providers.