Reviewed by the Help Dementia Editorial Team — our editors review every article for accuracy against guidance from the National Institute on Aging, the Alzheimer’s Association, and peer-reviewed sources.
Global brain sits at the center of this dementia and brain health question.
The Global Brain Health Institute has trained more than 300 dementia prevention leaders through its flagship Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health program since its establishment in 2016. While the specific figure of 800 graduates cited in various sources could not be independently verified, the Institute’s impact is substantial and well-documented, with Atlantic Fellows having graduated from over 65 countries across every inhabited continent. These fellows represent diverse professional backgrounds—from medical doctors and cognitive scientists to public health specialists and policy advocates—all united by a shared commitment to reducing the burden of dementia and promoting brain health equity worldwide.
The Atlantic Fellows program operates as a 12-month intensive training initiative, offered in hybrid format at the University of California, San Francisco or as a residential program at Trinity College Dublin, with both locations supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies. The program’s significance lies not merely in the number of participants trained, but in the caliber of training delivered and the geographic and professional diversity of its graduates, who return to their home countries equipped with cutting-edge knowledge in dementia prevention research, policy development, and care innovation. What distinguishes the Global Brain Health Institute from other dementia-focused training programs is its explicit focus on equity and its commitment to building leadership capacity in regions with the greatest burden of neurological disease but often the fewest resources. This approach reflects a growing recognition in global health that sustainable progress against dementia requires training local leaders who understand their communities’ unique challenges and assets.
Table of Contents
- How Has the Atlantic Fellows Program Built a Global Network of Brain Health Leaders?
- What Challenges Does the Global Brain Health Institute’s Training Model Address?
- How Do Atlantic Fellows Contribute to Dementia Prevention Research and Policy?
- What Distinguishes the Atlantic Fellows Program from Other Dementia Training Initiatives?
- What Are the Long-Term Sustainability Challenges for Global Brain Health Training?
- How Are Atlantic Fellows Building Sustainable Brain Health Initiatives?
- The Future of Global Brain Health Training and Dementia Prevention Leadership
- Conclusion
How Has the Atlantic Fellows Program Built a Global Network of Brain Health Leaders?
The Atlantic Fellows program operates through a carefully designed selection process that identifies individuals with the potential to drive systemic change in their home countries. Each cohort brings together approximately 30-40 fellows representing countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. The 2024-25 cohort, for example, includes 34 fellows from 24 different countries, ensuring that the program maintains its global reach while fostering peer learning across diverse healthcare systems and cultural contexts. This intentional diversity creates a unique learning environment where participants encounter different approaches to dementia prevention and care, expand their professional networks exponentially, and develop solutions adapted to their specific regional contexts rather than importing one-size-fits-all approaches.
The program’s curriculum integrates theoretical knowledge with practical application, combining classroom instruction at UCSF or Trinity with field placements and research projects. Fellows typically specialize in one of three areas: dementia prevention and risk reduction, care and caregiving, or policy and systems change. This specialization ensures that graduates can immediately contribute meaningfully to their home institutions upon completion, whether that means launching new community health initiatives, reshaping healthcare policy, or establishing research programs focused on regional dementia prevention priorities. The geographic distribution of Atlantic Fellow alumni demonstrates the program’s successful model: with graduates having returned to over 65 countries, the Institute has effectively created a distributed global network of advocates and practitioners who translate their training into concrete action. A fellow trained at UCSF might return to a hospital in Kenya to establish a memory clinic and training program for nurses, while another might reshape dementia care guidelines in Brazil or establish a community health initiative in Sri Lanka.
What Challenges Does the Global Brain Health Institute’s Training Model Address?
dementia prevention and care training remains unevenly distributed across the world, with high-income countries monopolizing access to specialized knowledge while low- and middle-income countries—which bear the greatest disease burden—face severe shortages of trained personnel. The Global Brain Health Institute’s training program directly addresses this disparity by explicitly prioritizing fellows from underrepresented regions and creating pathways for professionals from diverse backgrounds to gain advanced knowledge. This is particularly important because dementia prevention strategies must be culturally adapted and contextually appropriate; a prevention program developed for a Scandinavian healthcare system may be entirely unworkable in a resource-limited setting without significant adaptation. However, the program faces an inherent limitation that affects all international training initiatives: the challenge of ensuring sustained impact after fellows return home.
While the 12-month intensive training provides deep knowledge and builds lasting professional relationships, translating that training into institutional change depends heavily on local political will, funding availability, and health system capacity. A fellow might return to their country with innovative ideas but encounter resistance from entrenched healthcare hierarchies, competing policy priorities, or lack of resources to implement programs. The Institute acknowledges this reality and increasingly focuses on strengthening alumni networks and providing ongoing professional support to help graduates navigate these real-world obstacles. The Institute’s decision to train people across multiple disciplines—rather than exclusively training physicians or researchers—reflects an understanding that dementia prevention and care require multidisciplinary approaches. A social worker trained through the program may be equally valuable as a neurologist, particularly in contexts where community-based prevention and primary care are the primary touchpoints for dementia prevention.
How Do Atlantic Fellows Contribute to Dementia Prevention Research and Policy?
The program’s impact extends far beyond individual participant development to influence research agendas and health policy across multiple countries. Atlantic Fellows often return home to establish or strengthen dementia research units, launch population-based prevention studies, or reshape national dementia care strategies based on evidence-based practices learned during training. For instance, fellows have led efforts to establish memory clinics in underserved regions, develop community health worker training programs focused on cognitive decline prevention, and contribute to policy discussions about incorporating dementia prevention into primary healthcare systems. Research emerging from the Global Brain Health Institute network has documented the effectiveness of various dementia prevention approaches in diverse settings, contributing essential evidence about what works in different cultural and healthcare contexts.
This research fills critical gaps in the global dementia literature, which has historically been dominated by studies conducted in high-income countries on predominantly white populations. When a fellow from Nigeria or Vietnam conducts dementia prevention research in their home country, that work generates insights applicable to billions of people living in similar contexts who were previously invisible in the scientific literature. The program also produces policy advocacy, with fellows often playing central roles in developing or revising national dementia care guidelines, informing health system planning, and advocating for increased resources for brain health. Some fellows have contributed to international policy discussions, bringing evidence and perspectives from underrepresented regions to global conversations about dementia prevention strategies and resource allocation.
What Distinguishes the Atlantic Fellows Program from Other Dementia Training Initiatives?
Multiple organizations worldwide offer dementia-focused training, from traditional academic programs to specialist certification courses to online learning platforms. What sets the Atlantic Fellows program apart is its integrated focus on three elements: rigorous academic training, explicit attention to equity and global health, and intentional infrastructure for ongoing professional development and collaboration. While a traditional neurology fellowship might produce more specialists in clinical dementia care, the Atlantic Fellows program aims to produce leaders capable of shaping entire health systems and policies around brain health. The program’s operational model—with dual sites at UCSF and Trinity College Dublin—offers both advantages and tradeoffs.
The hybrid format allows more flexibility and reduces travel costs compared to exclusively residential programs, expanding access for professionals who cannot spend a full year away from home institutions. However, the hybrid model necessarily reduces the daily in-person mentorship and peer interaction that comes with traditional residential fellowships. The Institute’s decision to maintain both formats acknowledges that different fellows have different circumstances; some can afford residential participation while others benefit more from a hybrid arrangement that keeps them partially connected to their home institutions. The program’s explicit emphasis on reducing brain health inequities distinguishes it from training programs that focus primarily on advancing clinical or research expertise without centering questions of access and equity. This philosophical orientation shapes everything from which candidates are recruited to which research areas are prioritized within the curriculum.
What Are the Long-Term Sustainability Challenges for Global Brain Health Training?
One significant limitation of intensive short-term fellowship programs is sustainability: graduates often struggle to implement their ambitious plans when they return to institutions with limited funding, competing health priorities, and entrenched practices. The Global Brain Health Institute has invested increasingly in alumni networks and ongoing professional support to address this challenge, recognizing that the true impact of training only becomes apparent 3-5 years post-fellowship, once fellows have successfully navigated the difficult work of implementation and institutionalization of new programs or approaches. Another challenge involves the risk of “brain drain,” where highly trained professionals educated through the program are recruited by international organizations or high-income countries rather than returning to their home institutions.
While the program cannot control these career decisions, it works to strengthen incentives for return and to support fellows in remaining engaged with their home countries’ health priorities even if their formal employment shifts. Additionally, the program’s scale—training 30-40 fellows annually—means it will take decades to significantly shift dementia prevention capacity across all 65+ represented countries. While the network effect of alumni collaboration multiplies impact, the reality is that one highly trained fellow per country is insufficient to transform entire health systems. The Institute must balance its aspiration to train more fellows with maintaining program quality and the depth of relationship that characterizes the current model.
How Are Atlantic Fellows Building Sustainable Brain Health Initiatives?
Successful Atlantic Fellows have developed diverse approaches to embedding their training into sustainable programs. Some have established memory clinics or cognitive screening programs within existing healthcare facilities, leveraging their fellowship training to improve clinical care for dementia patients. Others have focused on training community health workers and primary care providers in dementia recognition and prevention strategies, recognizing that sustainable impact requires building capacity within existing healthcare infrastructure rather than creating new specialized centers.
A fellow might return to a resource-limited setting and establish a prevention program specifically adapted to the local context—perhaps focused on cardiovascular risk reduction, cognitive training, or social engagement initiatives—rather than trying to replicate elaborate clinical models from high-income countries. These examples demonstrate that fellows understand the difference between implementing programs that look good on paper and implementing programs that actually work within real-world constraints. The best outcomes emerge when fellows combine their advanced training with pragmatic thinking about their local context.
The Future of Global Brain Health Training and Dementia Prevention Leadership
As global dementia prevalence continues to rise—particularly in low- and middle-income countries where the majority of people with dementia now live—the demand for trained dementia prevention leaders far exceeds the current supply from any single program. The Global Brain Health Institute’s model has proven effective, but scaling it to meet global need remains an open question. Some possibilities include expanding the program itself, supporting fellows in establishing regional training programs based on the Atlantic Fellows model, or contributing to capacity-building efforts in other institutions.
The Institute’s work also reflects a broader shift in global health toward training local leaders rather than creating dependency on outside experts. By investing in professionals who understand their own health systems intimately and can navigate local politics and constraints, the Institute takes a different approach than models that export high-income country solutions to low-resource settings. This philosophy increasingly influences how international health organizations think about sustainable global health impact.
Conclusion
The Global Brain Health Institute’s Atlantic Fellows program represents a meaningful but partial response to the global shortage of dementia prevention expertise and leadership. With more than 300 graduates across over 65 countries, the program has created a network of skilled professionals committed to reducing dementia burden in their home regions. The program’s explicit focus on equity, its recruitment of multidisciplinary professionals, and its commitment to ongoing alumni support distinguish it from traditional academic training models.
For anyone working in dementia care, public health, or brain health policy—particularly in underrepresented regions—the Atlantic Fellows program offers one of the few structured pathways for advanced training explicitly designed for and by global health professionals. As dementia prevalence accelerates worldwide, initiatives like this one become increasingly critical infrastructure for building the workforce necessary to meet population health needs. The fellows themselves, now distributed across multiple continents and healthcare systems, remain the program’s greatest asset and the most reliable indicator of its impact.
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For more, see Alzheimer’s Association — caregiving.
