Oral

Responding to the recommendations of the Director’s Council of Public Representatives, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched an innovative program to forge partnerships (1) to study methods and strategies to engage and inform the public regarding health science in order to improve public understanding of the methods and benefits of publicly funded research, and (2) to increase scientists’ understanding of and outreach to the public in their research efforts. The NIH Partners in Research program supports two-year feasibility studies of innovative activities designed to improve public understanding of biomedical and behavioral science, develop strategies for promoting collaboration between scientists and the community to improve the health of the public, and to identify the conditions (e.g., settings and approaches) that will enhance the effectiveness of such activities. Projects represent a partnership between community and scientific/academic investigators. To assure equality in the partners’ roles, as well as equivalent empowerment and recognition, each funded application was “disaggregated” into two separate grants, one to the academic institution and one to the community institution. In this way, both the community and the academic investigator assumed the role of Principal Investigator. Of the 37 partnerships supported by this program, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is supporting four of them that focus on environmental public health issues. The four projects, which have a community PI and a university PI, are enhancing a variety of partnership approaches to foster collaborations among community residents and researchers to insure that research meets the public health needs of the community. Each project is evaluating the effectiveness of their strategies so that they can better inform future work in this area. In this session, presenters from each of the four projects will outline their project. They will address the environmental public health issues of the community that are being met, how this project is enhancing their partnership approaches, and how they are evaluating the approach. They will conclude by recommending the strengths and challenges of this grant approach to fostering equitable leadership of the joint project.

Session Objectives: 1. Attendees will be able to identify different culturally appropriate approaches to strengthen partnerships with communities to meet the expressed environmental health concerns of the residents. 2. Attendees will be able to describe the use of the Co-Principal Investigator mechanism to insure equitable sharing of resources and project control. 3. Attendees will be able to discuss how these projects will contribute to the advancement of community-university partnerships in environmental public health research and action.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH)