Researching the Connection between Mobility and Global Health

Research projects by Ulrike Beisel and Hansjörg Dilger receive funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin have begun investigating the effects of mobility on global health in two projects that were recently granted funding by the Volkswagen Foundation. Together with a team of researchers from around the world, Ulrike Beisel, professor at the Institute of Geographical Sciences, is looking at the spread of mosquitoes and the diseases they carry in India, Mexico, Tanzania, and Germany. Hansjörg Dilger, professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, has teamed up with an international network of researchers to study how mobility was restricted during the Covid-19 pandemic and what the individual, social, and political consequences of this were in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, South Korea, and Germany. Both projects have been awarded nearly 1.5 million euros in funding for a period of four years. The researchers were successful with their grant proposals in response to a call for global medicine and health research projects. This was a joint funding initiative launched by a consortium of European foundations in early 2020 - before the effects of Covid-19 had fully come to light.