This summer I completed my Leadership in Action placement at the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) in Seoul, working with the team building the BRIGHT Fund: a proposed Global South-led, multi-donor platform designed to close the financing gap that keeps promising health research from ever becoming a usable product in the countries carrying the highest disease burden.

My job was to help turn IVI's internal case for BRIGHT into a document a finance minister or sovereign donor could actually act on. That meant relying on peer-reviewed research, treaty commitments, and published public health data. The paper documents three structural failures: a translational financing gap that leaves promising research stranded for years before any investor has reason to engage, a market failure where commercial return rather than disease burden decides what gets developed, and a systemic disconnection where research, manufacturing, and market access are funded as separate problems with no mechanism holding them together. BRIGHT's answer is three integrated pillars, Innovation, Localization, and Commercialization, covering what no existing financing mechanism addresses end to end.

The most useful thing I learned wasn't a fact about global health financing, though the sector taught me plenty of those too. It was that holding a high evidentiary standard under a hard deadline, especially as the most junior person in the room, is itself a form of leadership.

Please feel free to message me if you'd like to see the full project in detail!