Igniting Hope in Buffalo New York communities: Training the Next Generation of Health Equity Researchers

The University at Buffalo (UB) NIMHD Center of Excellence in Investigator Development and Community Engagement will provide well-coordinated, careful mentoring, didactic training, and professional development individually tailored to each scholar’s needs. The education and training components of the Center of Excellence will fill a critical gap in our minority health and health disparities research environment by bringing comprehensive and rigorous training and mentoring in the discipline. This Center of Excellence will be the only formal training program in minority health and health disparities research at UB, bringing an enormously important resource to our training environment. The Center of Excellence will function as a centralized training center bringing coordination and communication to this key element of advancing health disparities research locally and nationally. The Investigator Development Core (IDC) will attract, mentor and train early-career investigators from a broad range of disciplines in transdisciplinary research in minority health and health disparities, including offering the opportunity to apply for pilot studies awards addressing health inequities and social determinants of health in the Buffalo region (Aim 1). Two of the most important elements for early-stage investigators to successfully establish their own independent research program are 1) training and mentoring, and 2) funding to support the development of preliminary results to be competitive for larger extramural grants. Our IDC is designed with these goals in mind. Because of lack of diversity in the health disparities research workforce, many researchers lack the insight that lived experiences bring to understanding systemic racism and the effects of discrimination and their impact on health disparities. A diverse workforce is more successful in engaging people from underrepresented groups in research and relevant stakeholders in policy making. Research related to racism and discrimination requires a multidisciplinary, broadly engaged, team science approach, which merges team science and community engagement. With this in mind, we will implement a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) Action Plan and leverage the resources and expertise of the proposed Center of Excellence to increase and diversify our workforce, especially in health disparities research (Aim 2). Our IDC will provide expert training and mentoring in rigorous research design, methodology, statistical analysis, and community- based participatory research to early-career investigators to support their research and advance their careers in minority health and health disparities research (Aim 3). One theme of our Center of Excellence is integration of community throughout. We will assist early-career researchers in engaging community members on their research team and/or as a member of their mentoring team. Our vision for the next five years is that our Center of Excellence will facilitate the training of a more diverse faculty from more disciplines to perform innovative research in minority health and health disparities to advance their careers to independence and to create systemic change to reduce health inequities in Buffalo and beyond.