Fri
9
On Friday, October 9 from 9:00 am to 10:30 am ET, The CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security in partnership with the WashU Bursky School of Public Health will host an event in Washington, DC focused on the role of universities in strengthening the connection between research evidence and policy action. During a period of increased skepticism toward the value of universities and the public health enterprise, how can researchers, policymakers, and communities collaborate to increase trust in university research and the value placed on public health evidence?
This event is part of the “Better Ways of Knowing” project, a multiyear initiative led by the Healthier Futures Lab at WashU Bursky School of Public Health in collaboration with the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research. The project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, aims to rethink how public health knowledge is generated, communicated, and translated into action. This convening is being deliberately held in Washington to bring together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to discuss how public health evidence can better align with the realities of policy decision-making.
In addition to the convenings, Better Ways of Knowing draws on global learning from four teams in Brazil, Kenya, South Africa, and Sri Lanka that are testing community-led ways of generating evidence on heat, digital health rights, cancer detection, and disaster recovery. In each setting, the people living with the problem help set the questions rather than answer someone else’s, and each team is working toward a specific decision, whether a policy revision, a regulatory change, or a municipal plan. Lessons from the convenings and from these four teams will come together in the initiative’s final recommendations on how health knowledge is produced and whose knowledge counts when it is put to use.
