UWI SODECO is international in its outlook, strategies, and operations and leverages its global network to focus on research priorities in developing and poor countries in order to inform better treatments for major health problems, as well as providing solutions to socioeconomic problems.
OUR GOALS
1. UWI SODECO SFM aims to solve a major medical question: what are the molecular mechanisms underlying the greatly increased risk of cardio-metabolic disease and associated neurocognitive deficits affecting populations, poor for generations, who gain wealth and acquire lifestyles that promote obesity and its co morbidities?
2. UWI SODECO SFM engages the appropriate stakeholders to ensure its research findings are used to create interventions to prevent or treat these chronic diseases. Interventions are designed to improve clinical management of cardio metabolic disease, reduce cardio metabolic risk, mitigate neurocognitive deficits and inform the design of nutritional supplements, drugs or behavioural change to reduce damage from early life malnutrition.
3. UWI SODECO SFS approaches problem solving in the socio-economic domains, and convenes appropriately skilled partners to solve other societal problems whose solutions create improvements in society as a whole, especially human capital and economic gain.
4. In this socio-economic space, UWI SODECO SFS currently places significant emphasis on rehabilitating, monitoring and maintaining mangroves in south Clarendon, Jamaica and simultaneously on creation and enhancement of livelihoods.
OBJECTIVES
1. Execute our priority programmes in Solutions for Medicine and Solutions for Society divisions of UWI SODECO
These are:
i. Saving Brains from Severe malnutrition. Recently funded by Wellcome Leap as part of a consortium comprised of scientists from: U Auckland, U of Otago, Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, Harvard U and UWI. The consortium gal is to create tools to be used to improve brain development in children across the globe between ages 1 and 3 years exposed to early life adversity. Our project within the consortium aims to use brain targeted nutrition to improve brain recovery in children being treated for severe malnutrition. The project learns from the pilot in Ghana and is being executed in Dhaka, Bangladesh in collaboration with ICDDRb.
ii. Gut microbiome as a determinant of obesity and cardio metabolic disease across the African Diaspora. This project is being conducted by a consortium in Loyola University of Chicago; University of the West Indies; KNUST, Ghana; U Cape Town, South Africa, and the Seychelles.
iii. Mangrove restoration along the south Clarendon coast in Jamaica where 1600 hectares of 3500 are dead.
OUR STRUCTURE
UWI SODECO is a research charity, a Limited Liability Company without share capital and registered under The Charities Act, 2013, embedded in UWI, which facilitates its work at national and international levels.
The structure enables UWI SODECO to work across UWI Faculties and Departments nationally and regionally, as well as with diverse types of organization’s, including academic, NGOs, and industry.
UWI SODECO is governed by a board which is chaired by the UWI Vice Chancellor or designate and includes the five Trustees of UWI SODECO.
UWI SODECO’s governance arrangements are deliberately flat to enable rapid, focused, informed and functional decisions to enable nimbleness in operations. It also presents an environment that facilitates the attracting of funds from both public and private sectors.
