New World Health Summit Academic Alliance-Lancet Commission to Strengthen Academic Responsibility and Trust in Science
Dean Adnan Hyder is part of a first-of-its-kind, 30-member commission of global leaders will assess and strengthen the value of academic institutions to society, build greater public trust, and support their contributions to society.
In an era marked by social, economic, environmental, technological, and political tensions, academic institutions can help societies navigate complex health challenges and generate sound, evidence-based solutions. But the steady decline in public trust in science—and simultaneous rise in political pressures on higher education—threaten to stymie academia’s independent research and valuable contributions to communities on a local and global scale.
In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, the World Health Summit (WHS) Academic Alliance and leading medical journal The Lancet have launched a joint commission that will examine and strengthen the core responsibilities of academic institutions to health research and to society in this evolving environment, and work to restore public trust in scientific institutions.
Called the World Health Summit Academic Alliance-Lancet Commission on Academic Responsibility for Trust in Science and Societal Change, the commission is composed of 30 interdisciplinary global experts, hailing from 22 countries and territories. Adnan Hyder, School of Public Health dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, is a member of the commission and its steering committee.
“It is very clear that trust in science, healthcare, and public health has been eroded over the past several years, and many leaders in institutions of higher learning are very concerned,” Dean Hyder says. “The goal of this new commission is to explore how academic responsibilities to society have evolved over time, identify the current challenges to this understanding, and determine how these institutions can interact with societies despite these challenges, lending knowledge and expertise to serve the public good.”
The WHS Academic Alliance is the academic arm of the World Health Summit, a leading global health platform that convenes experts across multiple sectors to develop solutions to key global health issues. In four working groups over the next two years, the WHS Academic Alliance-Lancet Commission will analyze the foundation and implications of academic responsibility in historical, local, and contemporary contexts, outline requirements for how responsible institutions should be designed in the future, and define practice-based approaches for how academic institutions can interact with societies. The group expects to disseminate its findings in a report in The Lancet in 2028 (and likely additional platforms), aiming to provide actionable recommendations for governments, nongovernmental organizations, private sectors, academia, and others.
Dean Hyder and several commission members also announced this initiative in a new commentary in The Lancet, published on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. In it, they underscore the need for international, cross-sector collaborations to combat health and science misinformation and enable academic institutions to maintain the freedom and independence to study urgent global issues and serve as catalysts for social good.
“As the concepts of social good shift with cultural context, the relation between society and academia should be [characterized] by more than the mere trade of applied research and higher education in exchange for public funding,” the authors write. “To optimally fulfill their role, universities need freedom from disruptive political interference. Researchers require space to pursue curiosity-driven research relevant to their disciplinary focus. They must also be allowed to openly report and discuss their findings and to follow the training and education mission of their academic institutions. Crucially, such academic freedom is not a commodity for scientists but serves as the foundation for social progress, economic prosperity, and human flourishing worldwide.”
This very work lies at the heart of the Boston University’s School of Public Health’s mission to promote social justice, equity, and human rights in local, national, and global communities. Students, faculty, staff, and alums have developed a rich body of community-engaged research and initiatives over the school’s 50 years, informed by their respective expertise and the voices of the populations most affected by this work. For example, over the past four years, Patricia Fabian has collaborated with Boston Public Schools, conducting experiments to test practical interventions to reduce students’ potential exposures to outdoor air pollution, and with Madeleine Scammell, leads the Chelsea & East Boston Heat Study (C-HEAT), a research partnership between SPH and GreenRoots that launched in 2020 to investigate and address the health effects of extreme heat in both communities. As the health sector continues to generate volumes of digital data, Debbie Cheng and SPH’s Center for Health Data Science have launched DataHub, an initiative that connects researchers to high-value datasets and connects researchers to high-value datasets, making it easier for them to study how multiple factors intersect, from neighborhood conditions to healthcare use.
And there is no shortage of overseas research collaborations: in India, Anoop Jain’s Sanitation and Health Rights in India nonprofit provides community toilet facilities to impoverished communities, while alum Sanjiv Gupta founded a community hospital and telehealth startup in Nepal. In South Africa and Zambia, multiple faculty have engaged in collaborative research for more than two decades with colleagues in the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HE²RO) office, working to combat HIV and other infectious diseases.
“Boston University School of Public Health is a school of practice,” Dean Hyder says. “It has a rich history of being engaged with local, national, and global communities for 50 years. We believe very firmly in having a social impact wherever we work, to inform our research and our teaching.”