UB Community Health Equity Research Institute awarded $3.6 million grant

Three years ago, Dr. Timothy F. Murphy and community leaders had their first meeting to plan out how University at Buffalo could win a federal grant to recruit and train the next generation of researchers whose work would address Western New York's striking health inequities.

That all led to Tuesday, when Murphy and other UB leaders announced they had indeed landed that grant: a $3.6 million award over five years from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. 

The grant will bolster UB's efforts to study the root causes of inequities in Buffalo, a city where a Black person dies, on average, 10 to 12 years younger than a white person. And it also could lure new research talent to Buffalo, drawn here by the opportunity to study health equity and craft proposals that could be implemented in Western New York to drive change.

"This transformative grant will allow us to address critical health disparities in our community by training the next generation of researchers to develop innovative solutions," said Dr. Allison Brashear, dean of UB's Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. 

With the grant, UB will establish the Center of Excellence in Investigator Development and Community Engagement, which will be part of the university's Community Health Equity Research Institute led by Murphy. Brashear said UB is one of just 10 institutions across the country that received funding from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to establish such a center.

UB said the new center will support research that benefits people who experience health inequities resulting from the social drivers of health, defined as the conditions in which people are born, live and work that influence health and quality of life.

Western New York counties are among the least healthy in New York, according to data in County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, an annual national report by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. And certain communities within the region, including many in the East Side of Buffalo, western Cheektowaga and rural areas, have a higher risk for chronic disease, showing how a person's ZIP code can often determine their health.

With the grant announced Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Tim Kennedy said UB can take its health equity "research to the next level."

"This celebration today is going to ignite hope and help us to better understand the inequalities that plague our community and communities like ours across the nation, because of racism, because of sexism, because of other inherent historical divisions that have created health inequities that are unacceptable anywhere, especially here," Kennedy said at a news conference Tuesday.

What will the grant fund? 

A major goal of the grant is to bring new researchers into the health equity field. 

So UB plans to focus on attracting early career faculty researchers and postdoctoral fellows in health care fields and also non-health care disciplines. Luring non-medical researchers should help address a range of social drivers of health, from poverty to substandard housing, and from access to healthy food to educational opportunities.

"A big goal of this grant is to train early career investigators to do health equity research," said Murphy, the grant's principal investigator who will direct UB's Center of Excellence in Investigator Development and Community Engagement. "So if we're going to change health disparities, we need to address all the social determinants of health."

Story from The Buffalo News. click to read the full article.