Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health Programme: Beginnings, Reflections, Highlights, Future

Abstract

The Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health (BEWH) programme emerged from an initiative that came out of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine in collaboration with Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, under the auspices of the University's Global Health Academy, that brought together the disciplines of human health, animal health and ecosystem health. Work began on putting the programme together in late 2009 with the first student intake in September the following year. At this stage the programme was run almost single-handedly by then Programme Director Dr Sharron Ogle with support from part-time academic staff and administration staff. In 2010, for the first intake, we had 99 notes of interest in our program, which is pretty impressive, considering it was a new programme. From those 99, half were of interest from Europe, a quarter from parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and the rest were North, South America, and Asia combined. We made 49 offers, and we ended up with 20 students on programme.