The University of Michigan will use a $6.75 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to establish a health equity research hub that will aim to reverse health disparities among Americans.
The hub, one of five nationwide, involves 17 researchers from across U-M, including Margaret Dewar and Lesli Hoey from Taubman College, who are experts on how the built and natural environments impact well-being. The hub’s community-led research projects will focus on health inequities such as healthcare access, food access, and the built environment.
Dewar, professor emerita of urban and regional planning, will serve on the hub’s multidisciplinary expert panel, providing insights into housing and aspects of the built environment. She will collaborate with fellow panel members and the leaders of the community-led projects on housing and economic development policy and planning, and contribute to training and resource development for community leaders, which may include webinars, podcasts, self-paced learning modules, and toolkits.
“It’s very exciting to link urban planning’s focus on social equity closely to public health issues,” Dewar said.
Hoey, associate professor and director of doctoral studies in urban and regional planning, will serve as a subject matter expert on food systems within the multidisciplinary panel, guiding what the principal investigator refers to as “instructional designers” and project managers in creating training and technical assistance materials. These resources will support community-based grantees in implementing their funded projects. Hoey will also meet with grantees and trainees in the program who incorporate a focus on food systems.
U-M is one of five institutions sharing in $37 million from the NIH’s Common Fund to operate “ComPASS Health Equity Research Hubs.” 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.”
U-M’s hub will involve researchers from a dozen schools, colleges and units, including the Michigan Institute for Clinical Research and Poverty Solutions. The U-M hub will be led by the School of Public Health and directed by Justin Heinze and Roshanak Mehdipanah.
NIH also selected the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Yale University, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore as ComPASS hubs. ComPASS stands for Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society.
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.
