UMB Initiative on Human Rights & Health
Matiangai Sirleaf
Carey School of Law
The UMB initiative on Human Rights and Global Health seeks to create and enhance UMB’s research collaborations with international partners on both issue areas. The Initiative will further UMB’s mission to improve the human condition globally. It will do so by bringing expertise from the global field to Baltimore and vice versa to support UMB’s potential collaborations and strategic partnerships in human rights and global health.
The Initiative will consist in part of a lecture series, which aims to highlight the work that we are doing at UMB in human rights and global health, as well as the work that other experts are doing in these fields. I will work with the lead international partner in the research collaborative, Professor
Ubaka Ogbogu to plan and organize The Human Rights and Global Health Lecture series. This lecture series would consist of hosting cross-campus and interprofessional lectures on both topics during the fall of the 2026-2027 academic calendar year. The Initiative will host these in a hybrid setting so that our external research collaborators are able to join the sessions remotely. This aspect of the Initiative furthers UMB’s global strategic framework to enhance our interprofessional global education and research.
In addition, the Initiative will result in the development and submission of a collaborative scholarly publication on Racism, Law, and Health Inequality. I was commissioned to write this book for Edward Elgar Publishing’s Principles of Health and Medical Law series. My coauthor Ruqaiijah A. Yearby and I are in the middle of finalizing the contract negotiations. The book will consist of a review of survey materials on substantive principles relating to health and equality globally and domestically in the United States. This book offers a springboard for further advanced research and study for scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and students. The book will help to identify best practices to grow expertise in global health, human rights and social justice. For example, the Strategic Framework notes that social justice-focused initiatives “stress the fair disbursement of common advantages and the sharing of common burdens.” The book project that will be produced because of this initiative does just that. The book project explicitly links global and local learning. Funds from the grant will be used to hire Kriti Sharma as an external consultant to help us gather the survey materials for the book as well as analyze existing data. The research for the book will begin at the beginning of the disbursement period of the grant and continue throughout the year.
Lastly, the Initiative will involve a working meeting with the members of the research collaborative that will bring together both UMB and external collaborators to develop strategies for future collaboration in human rights and global health. Global health and human rights are at a crossroads for many reasons. The research collaborative will bring some of the brightest minds in the field together to discuss the past and potential futures of the field. The working meeting will be in the spring of the 2026-2027 calendar year