Two Brown School faculty members have received 2025 Global Incubator Seed Grants to launch new international research projects focused on improving public health and refugee well-being.
The awards, up to $25,000 each from WashU Global and the Office of the Provost, are intended to help faculty build new international collaborations and advance early-stage global research partnerships.
Mary McKay, executive vice provost and professor, was awarded funding for a collaborative project on climate change and intimate partner violence among young women living with HIV in Uganda. In partnership with Makerere University, McKay’s team plans to collect quantitative data from 200 young women living with HIV and conduct interviews with 20 participants to capture their lived experiences. Findings will inform the development of integrated, climate-resilient interventions that address the structural barriers to HIV care while informing global public health strategies in an era of climate change.
Mitra Naseh, an assistant professor and founding director of the Forced Migration Initiative at the Brown School, also received funding to collaborate with Koç University in Türkiye on a project to support the mental health of Afghan asylum-seeking and refugee women. The team will update and adapt the Self-Help Plus (SH+) facilitator manual and audio recordings and pilot an SH+ booster session for 40 distressed Afghan asylum-seeking and refugee women living in Kayseri, Türkiye. SH+ is a mental health intervention developed by the World Health Organization.
The two awards are among 11 Global Incubator Seed Grants distributed this year to faculty teams and their international collaborators. Nearly 100 such seed grants have been awarded over the past five years to promote cross-border scholarship and policy-relevant research.