Hubs are part of National Institutes of Health Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society

With the goal of building the science that can 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—the University of Michigan will receive $6.75 million from the National Institutes of Health to establish a health equity research hub.

U-M is one of five institutions sharing in $37 million in funding 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.” 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 schools and colleges across campus, including the School of Nursing and 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 Poverty Solutions initiative will be key partners in the hub.

“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,” Heinze said.

NIH also selected New York University Grossman School of Medicine; University of Maryland, Baltimore; University of Mississippi Medical Center; and Yale University 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 ComPASS 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 NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health. Other NIH institutes, centers and offices participate in program development and
Management.

U-M’s Grant number: 1UC2CA293569-01