Internal Medicine Residency

Global Health Track



The Global Health Equities (GHE) residency program is an initiative designed to focus on the most basic determinants of health and disease. The program has two major goals:

  • Provide educational opportunities that will nurture and train health professionals who want to focus their careers on addressing health disparities domestically or globally.
  • Promote physician advocacy and service through working with our community and global partners to improve health care and medical education in our partner sites.

The program is interdisciplinary and includes residents from Medicine, Medicine-Pediatrics, Dermatology, Emergency Medicine, Radiation Oncology, Ophthalmology and Neurology.

“The global health track was by far the best part of my residency training. It allowed me a great breadth of clinical experiences that I otherwise never would have had. Jen and Joe are inspirational because of who they are both as people and as clinicians and its really been an honor to get to know and work with them. Residency can be tough, but through opportunities given to me through the global health track (whether a patient, a lecture, or a meeting in Kenya), I was reminded, this is why I went into medicine!”
            –Kimberly Ganster, MD

Curriculum Components

Briefly, this track provides an intensive month-long course, career building seminars, bi-weekly online didactics, monthly potluck discussions and resident presentations. GHE track residents must complete a scholarly project.

Abroad Time

Each resident will be able to spend 6 weeks abroad in the PGY2 year and 6 weeks in their PGY3 year. The goal is to engage in long-term relationship building; residents are expected to work with one site for both years. Currently, the GHE track is working with sites in:

“The Global Health Track provided my first real exposure to service, policy, & advocacy in the global setting. These are experiences that are often hard to come by in traditional programs, and the insight I gained will be invaluable in my future work.”
            –Gayani Tillekeratne, MD

Community-Based Continuity Clinics

In addition to the residents' primary continuity clinic, GHT track residents work in a second continuity clinic site focused on issues of community health and immigrant health. Sites include:

For More Information...

Specific inquiries about the Global Health Equities program can be addressed to:

Joseph M. Garland, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Division of Infectious Diseases
Jonathan Lax Center/Philadelphia FIGHT
1233 Locust Street, 5th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107
(215) 525-3047
joseph.garland@uphs.upenn.edu