Presidents' Council
Dr. Pelican’s work focuses on strengthening the multi sectoral systems needed to address the world’s most complex challenges arising at the interface of people, the planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership (the Sustainable Development Goals and One Health).
She founded and is currently the director of the Strategic Partnerships and Research Collaborative (SPARC; sparc.umn.edu) at the University of Minnesota charged with establishing large-scale, multidisciplinary programs and projects to address global grand challenges. She also founded and co-leads the University system-wide Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Initiative (sdg.umn.edu) to promote high impact programs and partnerships to meet these 17 UN goals from the local to the global level.
She was the Deputy Director and Principal Investigator for the USAID One Health Workforce Project ($64M, 2014-2020) that worked with more than 97 Universities in 17 countries in Africa and Asia to strengthen the multi-sectoral workforce responsible for addressing pandemic threats. She currently leads a partnership with USDA, CDC, FAO and WHO among others to implement new participatory and collaborative tools, most notably the One Health Systems Mapping and Analysis Resource Toolkit (OH-SMART; oh-smart.umn.edu) in the US and 29 countries globally to improve multi-sectoral cooperation around infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, community resilience, indigenous community food sovereignty, wildlife population management, natural disasters and other complex challenges.