JustHealth is the first MSCA Doctoral Network focused on decolonized, just, and trustworthy Foundation Models applied to the healthcare sector. It promotes a critical rethinking of how AI systems are designed, developed and deployed, by challenging dominant biases and practices that risk reproducing global inequalities in healthcare.
It will train 8 Doctoral Candidates to PhD level on how to ensure social justice in the design, development, deployment, and governance of AI systems in healthcare, thus contributing to just global health. In particular, JustHealth is embedded in a decolonized perspective throughout the research process, promoting context-sensitive AI solutions that respond especially to the needs and knowledge of vulnerable and historically underrepresented communities.
To address such a complex challenge, JustHealth integrates all the expertise needed, namely ethics and governance, technical and engineering skills, and clinical expertise, provided by a consortium of five leading institutions in AI research and talent development for healthcare applications. Importantly, this integration is grounded in a co-creation approach with partners from the EU and beyond, especially the Global South and US.
Through long secondments at academic and non-academic institutions in South Africa and the US, Doctoral Candidates will gain first-hand experience of diverse healthcare systems and socio-technical contexts. Doctoral Candidates will thus acquire strong intercultural teamwork skills and the ability to collaborate responsibly in a global setting.
Training Aims
In particular, JustHealth training aims to:
Enhance the attractiveness of careers in just and trustworthy Foundation Models for the healthcare sector through advanced, transdisciplinary training delivered by leading European, US, and South African experts.
Provide future academic, industrial, and public-sector employers with researchers who have broad skill sets developed through deep interaction across disciplines and stakeholders, and who are therefore able to work according to a challenge-oriented approach.
Develop researchers with a proven ability to transform new knowledge into services, products, and policies that address current and future global healthcare challenges within a decolonized ethics and governance framework, thereby promoting just global health.
Develop researchers able to conduct research based on a genuine co-creation approach and to share their outputs with the wider academic and stakeholder community, in line with an Open Science approach.