Education & Capacity Building

Our Approach

The Initiative is committed to preparing researchers, practitioners, and leaders to work at the intersection of climate change and global health. This requires not only domain expertise but also the technical skills to work with climate data, the interdisciplinary perspective to bridge climate and health sciences, and the translational capacity to connect research to practice.

CGHI’s education and capacity building efforts include formal coursework, research training, intensive workshops, and self-guided learning resources at Duke and with partner institutions across the observatory network.

Health research and field training — CGHI develops human capacity through courses, hands-on training, and translational research connections.

Current Entry Points

Rather than describing education only in broad terms, CGHI points to the pathways that are already available and the ones actively being built out for students, staff, and collaborators.

Available now

Hands-on tutorials and R package walkthroughs

CGHI's resources page already includes a full Sri Lanka climate-health tutorial plus practical walkthroughs for the weathertools and dataplane packages.

Browse resources

Research training through projects and observatories

Students and collaborators can plug into active climate-health work through the observatory network, the Climate+ project, and CGHI's data infrastructure efforts.

View projects

Short-course collaborations and workshop materials

CGHI's recent partnership with TriCEM produced climate-health training materials that are being adapted into open, self-guided tutorials and reusable teaching resources.

Browse learning resources

Expanding pathways

Climate-health coursework at Duke

CGHI is building more explicit course pathways, modules, and cross-school offerings so students can find climate-health training more easily.

CAST and cohort-based leadership development

Faculty and staff participation in Duke training cohorts helps connect CGHI learners to broader climate leadership and translational practice networks.

Bass Connections and team-based project experiences

Team-based learning models are a natural fit for CGHI because they bring together climate, health, policy, and data-science perspectives around real research questions.

Learning Tracks

Courses & Curricula

Formal climate-health teaching at Duke is being built as a bridge across global health, policy, environment, and medicine rather than as a standalone silo.

Climate and health modules embedded in existing DGHI coursework
Cross-school pathways connecting policy, public health, and environmental methods
Space to list named courses here as offerings and schedules are finalized

Research Training

Hands-on research experience in climate-health science through the observatory network and ongoing CGHI projects.

Student research opportunities at observatory sites
Methods training in climate data analysis and reproducible workflows
Mentorship from interdisciplinary faculty and staff

Workshops & Summer Institutes

Intensive short-course formats that bring together researchers from multiple disciplines and institutions for focused learning and collaboration.

Short-course collaborations and reusable workshop materials
Climate data methods workshops tied to CGHI tools and tutorials
Cross-site capacity building exchanges with observatory partners

Resources & Self-Guided Learning

Open-access learning materials for researchers who want to build climate data skills on their own timeline.

Tutorials and vignettes for CGHI R packages
Climate data orientation guides and methods explainers
Practical examples designed for public-health and interdisciplinary audiences

Building Capacity at Partner Institutions

Capacity building extends beyond Duke’s campus. CGHI is committed to strengthening climate-health research and training capacity at partner institutions across the observatory network, ensuring that diverse perspectives, local expertise, and institutional knowledge shape the future of climate-health work.

This includes co-developing training materials with partner institutions, supporting researcher exchanges, and building shared data infrastructure that local teams can maintain and extend independently.