$5.5 Million Grant from National Institutes of Health to Conduct Community-Engaged Research to Reduce Brooklyn’s Health Disparities
Jul 30, 2012
BROOKLYN, NY, July 30, 2012 - The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced a $5.5 million grant over five years to advance the work of the Brooklyn Health Disparities Center (BHDC), a joint venture of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and the Brooklyn Borough President's Office. The goal of BHDC is to reduce health disparities among minorities and new immigrants in Brooklyn.
The grant, under the leadership of principal investigators Moro O. Salifu, MD, professor of medicine and chief of nephrology at SUNY Downstate, and Ruth C. Browne, ScD, chief executive officer of the Arthur Ashe Institute, will support community engagement to drive research, training, and policy.
“Brooklyn is proud to be the most diverse urban area in America, where we are home
to everyone from everywhere,” says Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. “But
for far too long, our community has been burdened by a disproportionate share of largely
preventable illness, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and AIDS. Thank you
to NIH for this generous grant, which will allow the Brooklyn Health Disparities Center,
SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health to work
collaboratively to help make Brooklyn a healthier place to live, work, and play.”
An innovative community-academic-government partnership, BHDC was established in 2004
with NIH funding. “Since its founding, the Brooklyn Health Disparities Center has
used a community engagement process to develop a healthcare agenda for the Borough
aimed at eliminating health disparities,” says Dr. Salifu. “This grant will bring
together additional community partners and build a base of people across the education
pipeline – including students and faculty from high school to the college and graduate
levels – trained in identifying health disparities and ways to eliminate them.”
“The Brooklyn Health Disparities Center has paved the way for a new paradigm of engagement, and is grounded in the principles of social justice and community health empowerment that value the community as an equal partner in the research, education, and intervention enterprise,” says Dr. Browne. She notes that in the next few years, the Center will work with 14 local partners to train 30 undergraduate and graduate health disparity researchers, provide community-based internships to over 150 high school students, and develop research projects in collaboration with local organizations.
“The new grant will support the implementation of intervention research projects on two community prioritized issues in non-traditional settings,” says Mark Stewart, MD, PhD, dean of the School of Graduate Studies at Downstate and director of the grant’s Research Core. The first project is a randomized, controlled trial of a program designed to reduce HIV risk among African-American men in Brooklyn. It is led by Tracey Wilson, PhD, professor of community health sciences in Downstate’s School of Public Health, and conducted in collaboration with the Arthur Ashe Institute.
The second project, headed by Girardin Jean-Louis, PhD, professor of medicine and psychiatry and research director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Downstate, is designed to promote screening and treatment for sleep disorders and will explore the relationship between sleep disorders and metabolic syndrome. “Both projects will leverage the signature barbershop outreach strategies developed by the Arthur Ashe Institute,” says Marilyn Fraser-White, MD, associate director for research and training, Arthur Ashe Institute, and director of the grant’s Community Engagement Core.
The grant establishes four interconnected core operations that will each have SUNY Downstate and Arthur Ashe Institute co-directors to 1) build a dynamic research infrastructure to foster community-engaged research collaborations among SUNY Downstate's five colleges, the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and its community partners in Brooklyn; 2) conduct rigorous community-engaged research on high-priority health issues in Brooklyn: 3) strengthen local community partnerships to develop policy initiatives with the Borough President’s Office that reduce health disparities; and 4) train high school, undergraduate, and graduate-level underrepresented minorities to address health disparities.
For more information, please visit these sites:
Brooklyn Health Disparities Center
http://www.arthurasheinstitute.org
http://www.brooklyn-usa.org
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About SUNY Downstate Medical Center
SUNY Downstate Medical Center, founded in 1860, was the first medical school in the United States to bring teaching out of the lecture hall and to the patient’s bedside. A center of innovation and excellence in research and clinical service delivery, SUNY Downstate Medical Center comprises a College of Medicine, College of Nursing, School of Health Professions, a School of Graduate Studies, School of Public Health, University Hospital of Brooklyn, and a multifaceted biotechnology initiative including the Downstate Biotechnology Incubator and BioBAT for early-stage and more mature companies, respectively.
SUNY Downstate ranks twelfth nationally in the number of alumni who are on the faculty of American medical schools. More physicians practicing in New York City have graduated from SUNY Downstate than from any other medical school.