The Global Engagement & Empowerment Forum on Sustainable Development (GEEF), hosted annually by Yonsei University, has become a prominent international platform for advancing interdisciplinary dialogue on global challenges. Bringing together policymakers, academic leaders, and practitioners from around the world, GEEF focuses on developing collaborative, actionable solutions across domains including health, sustainability, and economic development.

The 2026 forum featured a panel entitled “Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Global Burden of Health,” highlighting how migration is redefining the distribution of disease and challenging traditional approaches to global health. The session was moderated by Professor Sarah Soyeon Oh, Research Professor at the Institute for Global Engagement & Empowerment at Yonsei University and a member of the Gastric Cancer Prevention and Screening Lab at Yale School of Medicine. The panel included Zhao Ni, Chul S. Hyun, and Sung Hwi Hong, whose contributions collectively addressed structural, institutional, and clinical dimensions of global health inequities.

Professor Oh’s presentation, “Gastric Cancer Burden & Health Disparities Across U.S. States, 1990–2021,” utilized Global Burden of Disease 2021 data to characterize temporal and geographic variations in gastric cancer outcomes. Although age-standardized incidence and mortality rates have declined substantially since 1990, the absolute burden remains considerable, with over 28,000 incident cases and 16,000 deaths reported in 2021. Importantly, her analysis demonstrated marked heterogeneity across states and populations, with higher burden observed in regions with larger proportions of Asian and immigrant populations. These disparities were shown to be mediated by a combination of socioeconomic factors, dietary exposures, particularly high sodium intake, and the under-recognized prevalence of Helicobacter pylori infection. The findings underscore the necessity of targeted, population-specific prevention strategies and the limitations of uniform national approaches.

Zhao Ni, Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Nursing, provided an overview of the Yale Institute for Global Health (YIGH) as an institutional model for addressing transnational health challenges. Established in 2017, YIGH integrates expertise from across Yale’s schools of medicine, nursing, and public health to promote research, education, and global partnerships. Its activities, including seed funding, coordinated research networks, and international training programs, illustrate how academic institutions can operationalize interdisciplinary collaboration to address health inequities that are increasingly shaped by migration and globalization.