A global health network that takes health equity further, faster.

University of Michigan Center for Global Health Equity • Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Impact Area

Education
Health equity

Year

2026

Our role

Website design
Website development
Member platform
Platform API aggregator

The challenge

CGHE leads health equity work around the world, but its aging Drupal site couldn't show it. Member profiles, projects, funding programs, and publications lived in separate, hard-to-update corners of the site, so the relationships between people, places, and research were invisible.

The Center needed a secure, scalable CMS that could handle large data sets, meet ADA accessibility standards, stay true to University of Michigan brand guidelines, and give a small team workflows they could actually maintain.

The work behind the work

We rebuilt CGHE's outdated Drupal site as a modern Webflow platform that connects 500+ researchers, 50+ projects, and over 68,000 research outputs across 183 countries, all in one accessible, easy-to-manage system.

What we built:

  1. A full migration from Drupal to Webflow. We moved and restructured years of content, consolidating 56 projects into a single reusable template.

  • A distinct identity within the U-M brand. The redesign follows University of Michigan guidelines while giving the Center its own look and feel, supported by a custom icon set.

  • 587 member profiles, managed live. Each page showcases a researcher's work, countries, and themes, connected to a Memberstack database so the team can manage members in real time. Visitors can filter the directory by school, theme, career stage, program, or country focus.

  • One home for over 68,000 research outputs. We pulled publications from OpenAlex, PubMed, and ORCID via API into a single aggregated database that updates weekly and links each output to its author's profile.

  • An interactive globe of projects and funders. Two map databases feed a custom Mapbox globe that plots CGHE's reach across 183 countries.

  • Funding status that updates everywhere. Admins mark a program open or closed once, and that status appears across the entire site.

  • Live impact stats. Eight key figures are pulled automatically from across the site, so the numbers are always current.

By the numbers


68,873 research outputs aggregated into 1 database

587 member pages created

183 countries reached through CGHE's research

56 projects consolidated into 1 template

8 stats pulled automatically across the site

2 interactive map databases

4 months from kickoff to launch

The Result


CGHE now has a modern, accessible platform that makes the Center's people, research, and global reach visible at a glance.

Scholars find each other's work wherever they start, applicants see open funding instantly, and the team manages it all without a developer.

The site launched with a new history page honoring founding donor Tachi Yamada and his family. Next up: member logins, so researchers can suggest bio updates, add fieldwork photos, and link their labs and projects, with each submission reviewed before it goes live.

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Let’s build something that means something.