Welcome to everybody it is a great day I would like to thank GCSMR for giving me an opportunity to share with you what we have been doing doing for the past several years I like to congratulate Dr Arul Authan for what we have seen what he presented some of it I came to know for the first time it is a phenomenal work he has established at Manipal, it is something we all need to be very happy about and proud of getting traditional siddha medicine originated from Tamilnadu going far and I also like to thank all the sponsors who have made it possible for the growth of sidha medicine in manipal.
I am Rajagopala Sridaran. I'm a professor in the department of physiology at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta Georgia. I would like to share some of the things we have done and the first activity was a memorandum of understanding with Mahe and Morehouse School of Medicine to do an elective course for fourth year students to do in person in India.
Under this program we had one medical student who attended this along with me last year in chennai and manipal and what we are doing right now is we are expanding this program although it was promoted by me initially it has Global Equity there is a David satcher Institute of global Health Equity at MSM, Dr Barney Graham who was a formerly deputy director of MSM as the founding director.
The next one is we are doing such that students are very much involved in these activities. There is a student group at MSM called Global Health interest group that promotes this fourth year elective. In fact they are so active in it they have started a go funding group to raise funds to support student participation in India.
Dr Barney Graham is trying to establish a system with the funding already a couple donated $2 million for this so there is a huge effort to get this funded through funding from NIH and also next one is MOU between us and Mahe gives an opportunity for the student and faculty exchange between MSM and Mahe facilitating collaborative research and teaching in fact Dr Arul Amuthan and Dr Selva Shanmugam have given lectures in our graduate course and that is helping them hopefully we have a joint research program with our students and postdocs using this MOU to move forward to promote what GCSMR is supporting research aspects.
Dr Selva Shanmugam, Dr Arul Amuthan, Dr Uma Senthil Kumar have been recently appointed as adjunct professors in the department of Physiology at my institution, So because of all of the we have already piloted to give you a online course which is going through approval process now so they as a faculty professors at MSM in my department developed an online course in Siddha medicine for final year medical students at MSM with a worldwide footprint as a first step in training Integrative Medicine doctors worldwide and that is another effort in addition to promoting siddha medicine in the western world through our institution we are going to have a global footprint.
Lastly but not least is a wellness Workshop is being planned at MSM in my institution to bring the integrative Medicine into practice to be held in Spring 2024 this is going to be something very important because we are not only talking about science but also bringing the cultural side of it including eating War items are going to be introduced over a 3-day workshop and we are very excited about it that as institutional support.