NARCH 12

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Project Summary Major health inequities continue to impact tribal nations, yet a serious shortage of scientists who conduct tribally engaged research aimed at alleviating health disparities affecting American Indian (AI) people persists. For several years, Cherokee Nation, the University of Oklahoma (OU) system and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) have partnered to address this issue by building tribal research capacity through the Native American Research Centers for Health (NARCH) mechanism. In this cycle of NARCH funding, the partnership among Cherokee Nation, OU and OMRF continues and, importantly for student career enhancement, expands to include the Oklahoma State University (OSU) system as a key partner for student career enhancement activities. The overall mission of Cherokee Nation NARCH is to develop durable research capacity within the context of a Native American tribal nation to address health inequities affecting the AI population of northeastern Oklahoma. To achieve this goal, the five Specific Aims of Cherokee Nation NARCH are: 1. to strengthen administrative infrastructure, including a Leadership Team (LT) and a Tribal-Campus Advisory Committee (TCAC), that ensures integration of career enhancement, capacity building and research activities; 2. to educate the next generation of researchers to engage meaningfully with Cherokee Nation in the context of tribal research, focusing on undergraduate, graduate and health professions students; 3. to build tribal capacity by developing a set of research codes to govern the conduct of genomic and other biomedical research predicated on the concept of tribal data sovereignty; 4. to conduct innovative research capable of seeding future research projects performed by researchers seeking to work within the Cherokee Nation setting; and 5. to evaluate activities of the partnership, including monitoring progress of student career enhancement, capacity building, and research projects, and evaluation of the overall Cherokee Nation NARCH program. Cherokee Nation NARCH provides a crucial opportunity to solidify the foundation for tribal capacity in health disparities research. The addition of OSU strengthens this project, as OSU has demonstrated remarkable success in the education of AI students in scientific and health professions fields, including the advent of the first tribally affiliated medical school in the US. Cherokee Nation NARCH therefore provides an unprecedented environment in which a Tribe, two research-intensive universities with large NA student populations (OU and OSU), and a biomedical research foundation (OMRF) will work synergistically to reduce the unacceptable disparities in health that continue to affect AI people.