Last Updated: 14/01/2026
Vanderbilt-Zambia Network for Innovation in Global Health Technologies
Objectives
The Vanderbilt-Zambia Network for Innovation in Global Health Technologies (VZNIGHT) will identify and nurture 12 American and Zambian research trainees (4 cohorts of 3) in an integrated training environment to develop and deploy new low-resource diagnostic technologies to enable Zambia to advance its malaria control campaign.
Each trainee team will develop and implement its own unique innovative solution for malaria detection in a multidisciplinary environment that includes the basic sciences, engineering sciences, and global health and clinical sciences at Vanderbilt University and multiple Zambia partner institutions, including the Malaria Institute at Macha, the University of Zambia, the National Malaria Control Centre, and the Tropical Diseases Research Centre. Annual tripartite cohorts of US and Zambian postdoctoral researchers – one trainee each from the basic sciences, engineering sciences, and clinical or public health sciences – will be integrated into Vanderbilt’s existing low-resource technology development team for a year, during which they will function as the multidisciplinary core of the project team, each contributin and reflecting on the others’ perspectives.
To effect the translation of research findings into realized products, the cohorts will then validate their technologies in field tests for six months in Zambia, where they will evaluate the effectiveness of the new technologies across the three strata of parasite prevalence – high, medium, and low.
Jan 2012 — Dec 2017
$1.74M
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