The University of Michigan will receive $6.75 million to establish a health equity research hub to help strengthen efforts to reverse health disparities, which keep millions of Americans in poorer health due to lack of access to food, health care and other needs.
U-M is one of five institutions sharing in $37 million from the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund to operate ComPASS Health Equity Research Hubs.
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The hubs, according to the NIH, will provide “hands-on research” and “technical scientific support rooted in health disparities expertise necessary for successful community-led research projects.”
Each institution’s hub supports the NIH’s 25 Community-Led Health Equity Structural Interventions Projects. U-M’s hub will be led by the School of Public Health and directed by Justin Heinze and Roshanak Mehdipanah, both associate professors of health behavior and health equity, and faculty leads at U-M’s Prevention Research Collaborative.
“The University of Michigan’s School of Public Health has been a leader in multidisciplinary research, and the hub will be no exception,” Mehdipanah said. “It will bring together a multidisciplinary team of researchers and community practitioners with extensive experience in applied community-based participatory research, practice and policy focused on addressing structural determinants of health with an equity lens.”
U-M’s hub will involve 17 researchers from a dozen U-M schools and colleges, including the School of Nursing and the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
The hub’s community-led research projects will focus on health inequities such as health care access, food access and the built environment. U-M’s Michigan Institute for Clinical Research and the Poverty Solutions initiative will be key partners.
“This is such an exciting NIH initiative to fund communities directly, which in turn leverage their local knowledge and resources to address systemic public health problems facing their areas,” Heinze said. “Our job as a hub is to be a centralized research resource for them, providing tailored scientific, technical and collaborative support to support the interventions happening in those communities.”
NIH also selected the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Yale University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore as ComPASS hubs.
ComPASS, which stands for Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society, is an NIH program designed for “community-based organizations to lead the way in researching, designing, implementing and assessing projects that address community needs and reduce health disparities.”
The program is managed collaboratively by NIH staff from the Common Fund, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institute of Nursing Research, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health. Other NIH institutes, centers and offices participate in program development and management.
