New Mexico Center for Advancement of Research, Engagement, & Science on Health

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Though much evidence exists of persistent environmental health disparities within minority and other marginalized populations, the real challenge lies ahead-to develop, implement, and sustain effective intervention strategies to reduce health disparities in these diverse populations, be they policy, clinical, social, or behaviorally based. Researchers at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (UNM HSC) have a long history of working with policy makers and community groups on environmental health (EH) issues. However, the infrastructure to research and fill information gaps to inform interventions does not exist. The efforts proposed by the Environmental Health Core (EHC), in collaboration with other components of the New Mexico Center for Advancement of Research, Engagement & Science on Health Disparities (NM CARES HD) establishes an intervention research agenda to reduce EH disparities based on sound research practices and informed by community needs. Our specific aims are designed to achieve this goal. Aim 1: To build on and expand existing relationships between communities, policy makers, researchers and clinicians to identify and address gaps in our understanding of EH disparities and develop an intervention science research focus in EH disparities. Aim 2: Initiate two new community partnership-based research projects, focused on interventions to reduce EH disparities. Project 1, Fiestas: Improving Food Security in an Urban Hispanic Community, will develop and pilot a collaborative community-based intervention to improve the social and food environment in an urban, food desert community with marked health disparities. Project 2, Zinc Reversal of Uranium Toxicity: Potential for Community-Based Intervention, responds to community concerns by testing a mechanism-based intervention to reverse the effects of uranium through use of zinc supplements in a prenatal cohort. Aim 3: Mentor minority trainees to develop and expand EH disparities research. We propose a vigorous, self-sustaining EHC to advance the scientific base of knowledge about interventions and solutions to socioeconomic, natural, chemical, and built environment issues contributing to the EH disparities faced by Native Americans and Hispanic communities in New Mexico.