The Thomas Francis Jr. Global Health Fellows work across the globe, adding value to public health efforts and learning what it takes to succeed. Here's a look at some of the recent Fellows and the impact they've had.

A commitment of $100,000 from former Dean Gil Omenn and his wife Martha Darling will kick-start an Institute for Public Health Genetics research project fund, Dean Howard Frumkin has announced.

Professor Karen Edwards has led the effort with IPHG faculty in creating two pilot projects that will focus broadly on interactions between genetic and environmental factors. At the same time they will address the ethical, legal, and social issues involved in translating research findings into actionable steps.

San Francisco, Nov. 1, 2012 -- The American Public Health Association, at its annual meeting in San Francisco this week, voted to adopt a comprehensive approach to protecting coastal water quality by modernizing the nation's Clean Water Act, which is 40 years old this year. The resolution was written by six University of Washington public health graduate students.

How does Twitter affect obesity? How can we engage diverse groups on the issue of climate change and health? How can we improve malaria treatment in Mozambique, where the disease kills half the children under five years old? These are some of the research studies funded by five innovative pilot grants just awarded by the University of Washington School of Public Health.

New designs could avoid future injury for children as well as adults

Flip over your keyboard and you'll see a warning: "Some experts believe that the use of any keyboard may cause serious injury to hands, wrists, arms, neck and back."

Timor-Leste, one of the world's newest and poorest countries, has one of the world's highest rates of maternal death, and many infants die within a month of birth. To improve the odds for mothers and their newborns, Health Alliance International (HAI), a non-profit affiliated with the School of Public Health, has launched a first-ever mobile phone project there to send important health messages by text to expectant mothers.

A select group of undergraduates will have an advantage when applying for graduate schools, thanks to a School of Public Health summer program that gives them a chance to work in cutting-edge laboratories.

"We don't have labs like this in our home school, so experience like this is really helpful," said Lilian Turcios, a senior at Texas Southern University who spent nine weeks in Professor Michael Yost's lab in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences.

Thirty high school students from the Yakima Valley learned that public health covers just about everything – from clean water to injury prevention to immunizations – on their recent visit to the School of Public Health. The students, who are considering careers in health care, also learned that public health is affected by a wide range of factors, from level of education to the gap between rich and poor. The hope is that they will go into healthcare careers and take their knowledge back to their communities.

For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug that helps prevent someone from acquiring HIV. It's called Truvada, and has been in use since 2004 to treat infected people. Now it has been shown to protect healthy people who are exposed to HIV. The UW's International Clinical Research Center, within the Department of Global Health, played a key role in examining the drug's effectiveness for HIV prevention.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld virtually all of the federal Affordable Care Act – a decision that affects millions of people and clears the way for the greatest overhaul of the health-care system in half a century. What does the ruling mean? Experts from the UW School of Public Health offered reaction, commentary and analysis to local media.

In the late 1970s, Mary Porter ('79) and her classmates studied nutrition as undergraduates at the University of Washington. They went on to work for hospitals and school districts or to run their own restaurants – ensuring patients, children and customers ate healthy foods. A few years later, the UW, citing costs, eliminated the undergraduate nutrition program.

Every day, nearly 4,000 children under 18 try their first cigarette, according to federal estimates. That adds up to more than 1 million new smokers every year.

Researchers at the University of Washington School of Public Health have found a strong association between home values and obesity among women in Seattle and its suburbs. The study is believed to the first of its kind in the U.S. to link obesity to assessed property levels at the individual level.

Virtual, long-distance training can teach primary care professionals the proper technique for performing a lung function test, a University of Washington-led study has shown. The breathing test, called spirometry, is important in accurately diagnosing asthma in patients over age 5, and also in seeing if a chosen treatment is appropriate.

Despite overall great public health progress globally, there are huge challenges ahead. Joseph Babigumira knows the magnitude of the tasks from hard experience. As a Ugandan physician doing HIV work in Uganda for his Master's degree, Babigumira learned that his driver's sister had gone into septic shock. An unsafe, illegal abortion was to blame. Four days later, the driver's sister was dead.

He's helped save millions of lives around the world, received numerous distinctions, and has a building named after him at the University of Washington.

Still, when William Foege learned of his latest award – the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor – he responded with typical humility. "They need to improve their vetting process," he said.

First, the good news: Americans are living longer.

Men on average now live to 76.2 years while women live to 81.3. That was a gain of 4.6 years for men over the last 20 years, and a gain of 2.7 years for women.

The bad news? Women's life spans are improving at a much slower pace than men's. And in hundreds of counties across the US, the life spans of women are actually decreasing.

This was a surprise to researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which looked at life spans by gender, race and county from 1989 to 2009.

In 1970, when the UW School of Public Health was founded, smog cast a brown cloud over the city, people smoked almost everywhere, and raw sewage flowed into some streams and lakes. We have come a long way since then. To mark National Public Health Week April 2-8, 2012, here are some measures of our progress and the ongoing research at SPH that ensures our communities continue to get healthier.