The Penn Violence and Injury Control Research Center

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose the Penn Violence and Injury Control Research Center (PVICRC) as a developmental ICRC whose focus is the reduction of violence and injuries among low-resourced populations through the highest caliber science, education, and outreach. The proposed Center will bring together university, community, and government partners around injury and violence intervention programs with the highest potential for impact. These high impact programs will typically have three cardinal features; they will: make structural changes (for example, to places), be scalable to cover large populations, and be sustainable over long periods of time. Injury prevention among low-resourced populations faces unique issues of poverty, poor community engagement, eroding physical and service infrastructures, growing health disparities, and structural stressors in the surrounding environment that have, heretofore, been under-studied by violence and injury prevention researchers. While not ignoring the importance of rural injuries, a primary focus of the proposed Center would be to build more effective and efficient approaches to reduce violence and injury in an urban context by focusing on the intersections of environment, biology and behavior. In doing so, this developmental ICRC will build the infrastructure and capacity for a sustained, comprehensive injury center that will use research, education and outreach to prevent injuries more broadly for vulnerable, low-resourced communities. The Center's current academic and clinical environment is rich in resources for injury science, education and outreach, but has historically lacked a centralized structure dedicated to the development and maintenance of high caliber injury research scientists, training, translation, and outreach. The goal of this developmental Center is to promote and perform the highest quality research, training and translation of scientific discoveries into practice and policy, in order to reduce injuries, violence and their impact nationwide, particularly among vulnerable urban populations. The proposed developmental Center is organized around two cores, the Administrative Core and the Training, Education and Outreach (TEO) Core, a Planning Board, and a Centerpiece Research Project, a 3-arm randomized community intervention trial of actual changes to vacant and abandoned spaces in Philadelphia to scientifically assess the impact of these changes on violence. Led by the Administrative Core, the TEO Core, a Planning Board, and a Centerpiece Research Project will collaborate to complete important research, training and translation activities while, at the same time, engaging the Penn community, as well as local and national stakeholders, in the planning, implementation, and advancement of a fully funded and sustainable comprehensive ICRC.