Our Story

The Global Strategy Lab was created to respond to an increasingly interdependent world where health and well-being are intrinsically shaped by circumstances, decisions, and events occurring at home and across the globe.

Pandemics spread between countries within hours, medicines are manufactured by varying standards, food supply lines are globally integrated, and climate change continues unabated. The costs and potential benefits of globalization have never been greater, but managing these risks and reaping these rewards depends on achieving global collective action among the world’s governments, civil society organizations, businesses, and international agencies.

Unfortunately, existing global institutional architecture seems to have reached the limit of what it is capable of delivering. The basic tools of governance at our disposal have not changed much since state sovereignty was codified in 1648, despite radical changes in the depth and breadth of what we intend to achieve from them. Lightning-speed breakthroughs in health science and medicine have not been matched by advances in the global governance mechanisms necessary to deliver them.

There is a critical need and great opportunity to strengthen global strategies for improved health and well-being worldwide with synthesized evidence, new approaches, and collective action. The Global Strategy Lab responds to capacity limitations by developing new methods for studying global interventions and training the next generation in how to use and/or benefit from them.

Traditional silos are broken down by being intensely interdisciplinary and working at the nexus of epidemiology, health policy, international relations, law, medicine, political science, sociology, statistics and other disciplines.

The Lab addresses the challenge of thinly spread expertise by networking leading scholars in the area and serving as a flagship for collaborative multi-centre research, education and policy initiatives. Having worked with partners like Chatham House, Cochrane Collaboration, Harvard Global Health Institute, and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, ensures the Lab helps deepen its network’s connections with and contributions to the world.