Part I: Get Started with Global Health Research

Getting started in global health research means acquiring a set of foundational skills that are easy to underestimate until you need them. How do you find a research question worth pursuing? How do you search for what’s already known without drowning in a sea of PDFs? How do you read a scientific paper—really read it—so you understand not just what the authors claim, but whether their claims hold up? And how do you do all of this as part of a team, often spanning continents, disciplines, and power differentials?

These are the questions we’ll tackle in the chapters ahead.

We start with context: what is global health research, and why does it matter right now? Science faces challenges it hasn’t seen in generations. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed both the extraordinary potential of research—vaccines developed in record time—and the fragility of public trust when science becomes politicized. You’re entering a field where your work can save lives, but only if people believe the evidence you generate.

From there, we turn to collaboration. I’ve placed this chapter early for a reason: in global health, how you work with others isn’t a soft skill to develop later—it’s fundamental to whether your research is ethical, feasible, and meaningful. You’ll learn about team science and what makes collaborations succeed or fail. More importantly, you’ll confront difficult questions about power, equity, and the ongoing work of decolonizing a field with complicated origins.

Next comes the creative challenge of developing research ideas. Steven Johnson writes that good ideas are rarely eureka moments; they’re slow hunches that accumulate over time, connecting and recombining until something clicks. I’ll teach you frameworks like PICO and FINER that can help structure your thinking, but the deeper lesson is patience. Your best ideas will come from immersion in a problem—from reading, listening, observing, and talking to people until the adjacent possible reveals itself.

The final two chapters in this section are practical skills courses disguised as book chapters. Searching the literature is more than typing keywords into PubMed. You’ll learn systematic approaches that can withstand peer review scrutiny, discover grey literature that never appears in indexed databases, and develop a healthy skepticism for predatory journals masquerading as legitimate science. Then you’ll learn to read what you find—starting with the Methods section (not the abstract), focusing on effect sizes and confidence intervals (not just p-values), and asking whether findings from one context apply to yours.

By the end of this section, you’ll have a toolkit for the earliest stages of any research project. You’ll know how to form productive collaborations, generate answerable questions, find relevant evidence, and critically evaluate what you read. These aren’t skills you master once and move past. They’re practices you’ll refine throughout your career, getting faster and sharper with each iteration.