Resource Guide
Research Project Ideas in Global Health for High School Students
Specific, data-grounded questions across disease burden, health systems, social determinants of health, and global health policy, without clinical access.
How to Use This List
Most pre-medical students focus their research interests on clinical medicine: the biology of disease, the science of treatments, the experience of patients. Global health asks a different set of questions: not "how does this disease work?" but "why do some populations bear so much more of its burden than others?" That shift in perspective, from the clinical to the systemic, is one of the most intellectually consequential moves in modern medicine.
These questions are answerable using publicly available data and published research, with no clinical access or laboratory equipment required. Our guide to writing a research question helps focus an investigation, and the epidemiological and policy literatures are extensive, rigorous, and largely open access.
Choose a Method Before a Topic
The method is the decision that determines whether a project can actually be finished; the topic is secondary. Every question below is tagged with one of these four routes, its difficulty, and the finished output it should produce.
Public dataset
WHO Global Health Observatory, the Global Burden of Disease study and Our World in Data all publish comparable country-level health data for free.
One dataset, a spreadsheet, and clarity about how the indicator is defined.
Literature review
Synthesise the evidence on one health question across countries, including where the studies disagree.
PubMed Central and Google Scholar, both free.
Policy analysis
Evaluate one health programme against its own stated targets, using published evaluations rather than press releases.
WHO, World Bank or NGO evaluation reports, which are public.
Ethics argument
Defend a position on a genuine allocation or justice question in global health, engaging the strongest objection.
Core reading on the problem, and a position you are willing to defend.
Ideas by Sub-Field
Disease burden & epidemiology
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What does the data reveal about why the burden of a specific disease falls so unevenly across countries?
Public dataset Intermediate
Output: A cross-country analysis of one disease burden using WHO or GBD data, with your own charts
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How effective has a major global health intervention, such as a vaccination programme, actually been?
Policy analysis Advanced
Output: An evaluation of one programme against its stated targets, using published assessments
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What do trends in non-communicable disease prevalence reveal about development and urbanisation?
Public dataset Intermediate
Output: A trend analysis linking non-communicable disease data to development indicators
Health systems & access
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What determines whether a health system achieves universal coverage, and what are the critical factors?
Comparative analysis Advanced
Output: A structured comparison of two systems on named coverage and outcome measures
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How do different models of health financing, from tax-based to insurance-based, affect equity and outcomes?
Policy analysis Advanced
Output: A comparison of financing models assessed on equity and outcomes rather than ideology
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What explains the performance gap between health systems with similar levels of spending?
Public dataset Advanced
Output: An analysis of spending against outcomes across comparable countries, with the outliers explained
Social determinants of health
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How does income inequality within a country affect health outcomes independently of absolute income?
Literature review Advanced
Output: A review of the inequality and health literature, addressing the absolute income confound directly
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What does the evidence show about the health consequences of food insecurity or housing instability?
Literature review Intermediate
Output: A review of the evidence on one social determinant and its measured health effect
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How do gender norms shape health outcomes for women in different country contexts?
Literature review Advanced
Output: A review of how gender norms shape health outcomes across two country contexts
Global health policy & ethics
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What are the ethical tensions in global health aid, and how have they played out in a specific intervention?
Ethics argument Advanced
Output: A position paper on aid ethics grounded in one real intervention rather than in principle
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How should health resources be allocated between preventing disease and treating it?
Ethics argument Intermediate
Output: An argued essay that states an allocation principle and answers the strongest objection
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What does the COVID-19 pandemic reveal about the politics of global health governance?
Policy analysis Advanced
Output: An analysis of governance failures during the pandemic, assessed against stated obligations
Population Thinking
Global health operates at the population level: its unit of analysis is not the patient but the community, the country, or the income quintile. Learning to think at that scale, to ask why outcomes are distributed the way they are across populations rather than within individuals, is one of the most important intellectual transitions in medical and public health education.
A mentor helps a student engage with epidemiological data, understand the logic of public health evidence (what makes a study causal rather than correlational, what the evidence for an intervention actually shows), and write with the measured, evidence-grounded register that public health research demands. These skills strengthen applications across medicine, development, economics, and policy.
Free PDF
Take the 50 strongest ideas with you
A free PDF with fifty of these questions tagged by method and difficulty, the output each should produce, and the feasibility checklist we apply before recommending any project. We email it to you, along with occasional guidance worth having. No obligation, and your details are not passed to anyone.
Taking a Question Further
Global health connects directly to medicine, economics, politics, and anthropology. For the wider context, see our Medicine & Life Sciences field page, our companion guides to medicine and economics, and our broader research project ideas across all six fields. When you are ready to develop a project with a mentor who works in the field, the Research Scholar programme is built for exactly that.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is global health research, and how is it different from medicine?
Global health focuses on the social, economic, political, and environmental determinants of health outcomes across populations and countries. It is less about clinical diagnosis and treatment and more about why some populations get sick more than others, how health systems are organised and funded, and what policies and interventions actually reduce the burden of disease at scale.
Do I need clinical experience or scientific background?
Neither is required. Global health is inherently interdisciplinary: it draws on epidemiology, economics, political science, anthropology, and history. A student from any of these backgrounds can contribute meaningfully. What matters is the ability to engage carefully with data, published research, and policy evidence.
What data sources are available for global health research?
An exceptional amount: the WHO, World Bank, Our World in Data, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and many national health systems publish open data on disease burden, mortality, access to healthcare, and health system performance. These datasets make robust quantitative and comparative projects genuinely accessible.
How is a global health project useful for applications?
Very directly for medicine, public health, health policy, and international development courses. Strong global health projects demonstrate exactly the kind of systemic, evidence-based thinking these programmes value. They are also compelling because few applicants have gone beyond clinical experience to think about health at population level, which is ultimately what determines most of human health.
Now placing students for the October start. Places in each field are limited by mentor availability. We review applications on a rolling basis.
ScholarBridge matches students with doctoral-level or equivalent research mentors across six academic fields. Every project is student-led and completed to a standard the student can stand behind in any university interview.
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