Five major European Universities to form Alliance for Global Health

Five major research universities create a European Alliance committed to Higher Education in Global Health and Well-being challenges at the heart of European values

Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich (Germany), Lund University (Sweden), Porto University (Portugal), Szeged University (Hungary) and Paris-Saclay University have decided to join forces to create a pilot project of a European University, an “Alliance for Global Health”.

BETTER LIVING TOGETHER: A GLOBAL CHALLENGE

In a global context where public health, environment and food security have become planetary challenges, access to healthcare, clean water and clean air is still not a right for all. In order to build a peaceful world, ensuring wellbeing for all, it has become urgent to find fair, sustainable and scientifically informed solutions. Europe and its future generations face the challenge to take the position of inventors and leaders of a new paradigm where knowledge and expertise will be elaborated, transferred and valued at the highest level, and where sharing resources, sustainable development and better living together will be promoted as worldwide values.

FUTURE CITIZENS TRAINED ON EUROPEAN VALUES

The five European partner universities, spreading over various European territories and ecosystems have the ambition to train the future generations of European citizens on issues and for professions linked to the mentioned challenges, but also capable of adapting themselves to a globalized and changing environment. In that way they will become vectors of European values such as the respect of rights, solidarity, parity, secularism, freedom of speech, access to knowledge for all, mutual understanding between cultures and the respect of the individuals in all their diversity.

STRENGTHS AND STRATEGY OF THE ALLIANCE FOR GLOBAL HEALTH

The main strength of the Alliance will be to deploy an innovative pedagogic strategy, the originality and richness of which is based on:

• The excellence and complementarity of the partners in fields related to global health challenges (health sciences and engineering, social and human sciences, sports sciences, agricultural sciences, climate and environment sciences, …)
• Unique technological infrastructures (among which two synchrotron facilities)
• The localisation of the Alliance’s campuses in diversified and dynamic economic areas

The Alliance will build on network operating modes which have been successfully experimented among the partners and will strengthen them through essential new structural elements. Thus, the Alliance will be managed within a new, shared governance mode associating students and staff, and it will develop innovative common pedagogic resources and set up dedicated transnational pedagogic and management teams. New European multidisciplinary programmes integrating human and animal health, climate and its impact on ecosystems, exploitation of new resources and digital tools among others, will be deployed.

These programmes will be backed by high-level expertise, fed in with international experience and facilitated by digital tools. They will be oriented towards the implementation of projects and the immersion in a professional environment (e.g. companies, hospitals, governmental or non-governmental organisations, etc.) and will thus allow the largest possible number of students to develop a personalised training pathway and a career plan relevant to the global job market. In parallel, the programmes will allow them to build up an unwavering civic commitment, independent and critical thinking, curiosity and creativity.

This ambitious European project will give each and every student the best chance to fulfil professionally and to contribute to well-being and living well of the world’s population in the face of sanitary problems and environmental challenges, to promote the best human, cultural and economic benefits for the future societies.

The present circumstances demand strong European cooperation so the partners will put together their diverse expertise stemming from all regions of the continent and strive collectively for a better future.