Political science student nabs Trudeau scholarship
The Trudeau scholarships are the largest in Canada for doctoral studies in the social sciences and humanities. Worth up to $200,000 over a maximum of four years, only 15 of the coveted national prizes, named after a Canadian prime minister, are awarded annually. They help defray the tuition and living expenses of doctoral candidates who stand out because their research addresses compelling present-day concerns.
Brown’s $150,000 award is over three years. It will enable her to evaluate the efficacy of global public-private partnerships, known as GP3s, in getting life saving drugs and vaccines to people infected with HIV and dying of AIDS in Africa. Brown seeks to remedy what she calls “a serious dearth of studies that investigate how individual partnerships work and what impact they have.”
In recent years, pharmaceutical companies, governments and intergovernmental organizations have partnered to increase access to essential medicines and vaccines for infectious diseases, which are killing millions of people in Africa. GP3s are supposed to compensate for market and government difficulty in getting drugs and vaccines to people with HIV/AIDS in a timely and economic fashion.
Brown notes that these partnerships are largely unregulated and unmonitored. She wants to develop a model for implementing GP3s to make anti-retrovirals more accessible to people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Brown believes that pharmaceutical companies are guided more by the protection of patents and the pursuit of profit than dedication to saving the lives of people in developing countries.
“When you know that anti-retroviral drugs are available and easy to administer, it is horrific to see people suffering and dying at home and in hospitals of AIDS, as I have in Ghana,” says Brown. “It’s beyond objectionable.”
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada also recently awarded Brown its prestigious Canada Graduate Scholarship, worth $105,000 over three years.
Backgrounder: Political science student nabs Trudeau scholarship
- Sherri Brown’s success in generating awareness about how gender inequality makes women more vulnerable to contracting HIV in Africa helped her secure a Trudeau doctoral scholarship. In the last three years, Brown has presented papers at nine major conferences across Canada and the United States. One of her papers, Engendering Approaches to HIV/AIDS Prevention and Impact Migration in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, examines how sexuality, discrimination, poverty and education impact a woman’s risk of contracting HIV and living with AIDS.
- Globally, HIV infection rates for women continue to rise disproportionately to infection rates among men. Women and girls now represent 57 per cent of all people in sub-Saharan Africa living currently with HIV/AIDS.
- Brown has a gripping story to tell about how research on her Master’s thesis in Ghana in 2004 inspired her doctoral research. She gave money to a woman dying of AIDS so that the woman could get to the hospital to ease her pain. The younger of the woman’s two children, aged 13 and 17, was infected with HIV. Brown says, “I returned to Canada determined to find out why this woman and people like her were not able to access pharmaceuticals; why they were deprived of health and dignity when anti-retrovirals could have saved her and her daughter’s lives.”
- Questions that Brown seeks to answer in her doctoral research:
Are these partnerships sustainable models of pharmaceuticals access for developing countries?
What alternatives are there to these partnerships for increasing access to anti-retrovirals and HIV/AIDS related pharmaceutical products?
What is the appropriate and ethical role of the pharmaceutical companies in an age of this devastating pandemic?
What are the ethical and human rights implications of the partnership model?
- SFU political science professor Stephen McBride is Brown’s doctoral thesis supervisor. He says, “Sherri’s superb academic performance, dynamism and strong commitment to social justice issues make her a worthy recipient of the Trudeau scholarship.”
- Brown is originally from Burlington, Ontario. She lives in Vancouver. Brown has a BA with Distinction in Political Science from Concordia University in Montreal. She has a Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Calgary.
- Brown is the third SFU student to receive a Trudeau scholarship. Amy Mundorff, a doctoral student in forensic anthropology, was the previous recipient in 2005. Robert Huish also earned a Trudeau scholarship in 2004.