Universities Allied for Essential Medicines

Global Health Report Card

This site is built on top of WordPress, though it certainly doesn’t utilize a traditional blog format. We’ve leveraged WordPress’ support for “custom post types” to implement a robust data structure to handle the “school” content type while relying on the built-in “post” type to manage the infographics. The data and the site are easy to maintain from the WordPress backend thanks to clearly-defined fields and batch import/export capabilities.

Universities Allied for Essential Medicines
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Systems Used

Client Sector

Date Completed

  • April 2013

Universities are major drivers of medical innovation, and how they conduct research, license their intellectual property, and educate their medical students can make a big difference to the over 1 billion people suffering from neglected diseases. The University Global Health Impact Report Card evaluates the top U.S. and Canadian research universities on their contributions to urgent global health research and access to treatment worldwide.

The site is built on top of WordPress, though it certainly doesn’t utilize a traditional blog format. We’ve leveraged WordPress’ support for “custom post types” to implement a robust data structure to handle the “school” content type while relying on the built-in “post” type to manage the infographics. The data and the site are easy to maintain from the WordPress backend thanks to clearly-defined fields and batch import/export capabilities.

There’s a lot of custom JavaScript to handle pretty elaborate interactions and state changes, which we’re extremely proud of — a lot of the data is loaded via AJAX calls, but we’ve configured the site in a way that you can still share a particular school’s URL on Facebook or Twitter. Don’t miss the comparison tool, which makes it easy to pit your alma mater against its arch-rival to see how they stack up. Last but not least, we integrated a Salsa petition to drive users to take action.

We can’t take credit for the overall look and feel of the site or for the infographics themselves, which were designed by Jen Matsumoto. We just brought her designs to life.

This site won a Best in Class Award from the Interactive Media Awards in 2014.

In early 2015, we helped UAEM launch a sister site for universities in the United Kingdom, University Global Health Research League Table.