Everything has a price - unless one SFU lecturer has her way.
Simon Fraser University senior lecturer Kate Tairyan's pitch to help develop the world's first free university has won her a $100,000 grant and the title of a "Rising Star in Canada."
Tairyan, who teaches in SFU's faculty of health sciences, is one of 19 chosen in the first phase of an initiative called Canadian Rising Stars in Global Health, run by Grand Challenges Canada.
Each of the 19 people named in the effort will receive a $100,000 grant to help develop their ideas.
People from across the country submitted video proposals of their ideas.
"The idea behind the world's first free university is to use existing web-based and mentoring resources and to make them more broadly available to revolutionize health sciences education," explains Tairyan.
"We can educate thousands of trainees at a time, particularly in developing countries, with students remaining in their home environments.
"We address the World Health Organization's expressed need to use computer-based technologies to create four million more health providers and tackle health millennium development goals."
Founding collaborators and funders of the free university include the U.S. Centre for Disease Control, NATO's Scientific Peace Initiative, the World Bank, WHO and the World Medical Association.
The video presentation shows Tairyan and her mentor, Erica Frank (free university founder and Canada research chair at the University of B.C.) and colleagues in Nairobi, Kenya and Bogota, Colombia describing how they will launch pilot programs this year in a bid to help combat the shortage of trained health workers - more than a million in Africa alone.
Tairyan has a degree in preventative medicine from the State Medical University in Armenia and a diploma in health management from Armenia's National Institute of Health. She received the Ed Muskie Graduate Fellowship award to obtain a master of public health degree with a concentration in global health leadership from Emory University, under Frank's leadership.
Grand Challenge Canada is a new global health organization focused on solving challenging health conditions through innovation.
It participates in a consortium with Canada's International Development Research Centre and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
To see Tairyan's video, go to http://bit.ly/KateTairyan.
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