16 July 2015
A new Joep Lange Institute and Joep Lange Chair and Fellowship programme will be established in commemoration of UvA professor Joep Lange and his colleague Jacqueline van Tongeren.This announcement comes one year after the MH17 disaster, in which Lange and Van Tongeren lost their lives. According to a statement released yesterday by the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD), the new Institute will provide a platform to continue Lange’s mission of improving access to quality healthcare in developing countries.
The first funding, consisting of $20 million from private sources in the United States, has been confirmed. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs will support the Joep Lange Chair.
The Joep Lange Institute, which will be based in Amsterdam, will combine innovation, research and action in order to improve access to quality healthcare by building efficient and effective health systems on a foundation of solidarity. Working with international and local partners from both the public and the private sector, the Institute will identify and initiate innovations in healthcare delivery and financing. This includes developing new technologies for diagnostics, new ways to connect people to quality healthcare through mobile applications and new approaches to make use of big data.
The Institute will also encompass the Professor Joep Lange Chair and Fellows Programme, which will be set up within Academic Medical Center’s (AMC-UvA) department of Global Health with the support of the Dutch government. The Chair and Fellows program will bring together the brightest minds from all over the world in the field of global health.
Joep Lange was a globally respected doctor, researcher and activist. In the early 2000s, Lange, who held a professorship in Medicine at the University of Amsterdam, became the driving force behind the creation of PharmAccess, a foundation dedicated to making healthcare accessible in the developing world.