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.
Ideas by Sub-Field
Disease burden & epidemiology
- ↳ What does the data reveal about why the burden of a specific disease falls so unevenly across countries?
- ↳ How effective has a major global health intervention, such as a vaccination programme, actually been?
- ↳ What do trends in non-communicable disease prevalence reveal about development and urbanisation?
Health systems & access
- ↳ What determines whether a health system achieves universal coverage, and what are the critical factors?
- ↳ How do different models of health financing, from tax-based to insurance-based, affect equity and outcomes?
- ↳ What explains the performance gap between health systems with similar levels of spending?
Social determinants of health
- ↳ How does income inequality within a country affect health outcomes independently of absolute income?
- ↳ What does the evidence show about the health consequences of food insecurity or housing instability?
- ↳ How do gender norms shape health outcomes for women in different country contexts?
Global health policy & ethics
- ↳ What are the ethical tensions in global health aid, and how have they played out in a specific intervention?
- ↳ How should health resources be allocated between preventing disease and treating it?
- ↳ What does the COVID-19 pandemic reveal about the politics of global health governance?
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.
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.
Summer cohort deadline · Applications due June 25. A few places remain. We assess applications in order of receipt.
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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