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This project adapts Strong Roots Perinatal Dialectical Behavior Therapy, an evidence-based mental health and early relational intervention, for perinatal women served by the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz in Mexico City. Roughly one in five women in Mexico experiences perinatal depression, with far higher rates among those facing gender-based violence, obstetric violence and social adversity, yet specialized care is scarce and concentrated in a few institutions. Partnering Michigan and Mexican clinician-researchers, the team tailors the group-based therapy to the local context, trains clinic providers, and delivers it to women at the institute's Perinatal Psychiatry Clinic. Because the clinic is committed to sustaining the groups and trains 25 to 30 new providers each year, the work seeds lasting capacity to expand perinatal mental health care across Mexico's public health system.

This project works with older women in the village of Kfarhouna, in southern Lebanon, to understand their health needs and priorities as they age. Lebanon has the fastest-aging population in the region, and rural areas face chronic underinvestment in healthcare, transportation, and social services, circumstances that fall hardest on older women, many of whom live alone. Using community-engaged research, the team builds a coalition of religious leaders, village representatives, and women leaders, then convenes focus groups to surface how women themselves define health and healthy aging. Partnering with the American University of Beirut and the local municipality, the project produces a needs assessment and a community-designed plan to guide a future program, laying the groundwork to strengthen local systems that support healthy aging.

This project examines how diet quality and environmental sustainability can be balanced across generations, using the established ELEMENT cohort in Mexico City. The collaboration grew from a University of Michigan food systems event, where the team recognized that the cohort led by researchers at the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública offered a rare opportunity to study when in development eating behaviors are most shaped and how dietary change intersects with the environmental footprint of food. Bringing together expertise in child development, nutritional epidemiology and sustainable urban food systems, the team analyzes real-world dietary data to understand the tradeoffs families navigate. The findings aim to inform nutrition policy that advances both healthier diets and environmental sustainability in urban Mexico.

This project tackles the pre-analytic sources of variation that undermine artificial intelligence in pathology when tools trained elsewhere are deployed in new settings. Working from bottlenecks identified by Aga Khan University pathologists in Nairobi, including inconsistent fixation and staining across referring sites, scanner and monitor color variance, slide focus artifacts and a shortage of Kenya-representative digital datasets, the team pairs Aga Khan and Michigan investigators to build quality control, stain normalization and multi-scanner validation into the workflow. A joint steering committee governs the work, and fairness audits at months six and twelve check performance across patient subgroups. The goal is to enable Aga Khan Pathology to deploy digital pathology for primary diagnosis while producing openly documented methods that other institutions can adapt.