BCC-CCM Student and Faculty Career Development Project

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The ultimate goal of this project is to improve the mental and physical health of the Blackfeet Nation and to address our health problems through the development of a sustainable Blackfeet Community College Center for Culture as Medicine (BCC-CCM). The Blackfeet and other Native peoples experience severe heath disparities, and, arguably, the best qualified individuals to address these disparities are Native researchers. However, there are precious few Native investigators with health research expertise and few sustainable health research centers within Native communities that are controlled by the community. The Blackfeet community has indicated that one of its primary health concerns is mental health, and it also has indicated the desire for community members to address this problem themselves. Thus, this capacity building project, entitled BCC- Student and Faculty Research Development (BCC-SFRD), will enhance the capacity of BCC to develop the BCC-CCM that will strive to mitigate the high incidence of mental health disease among the Blackfeet population. Leveraging the work initiated with a previous NARCH capacity building grant, BCC has begun to build a research culture that has resulted in two scientific publications (1,2), a student research laboratory capable of biomarker and survey analysis, and an intense interest among BCC faculty and administration and the Blackfeet community to develop this application. The present project will leverage the progress, interest, and preliminary data generated from the previous NARCH grant to build the human resources necessary for the research center, including faculty and student researchers, as well as the means to make the center sustainable. It also will be important to involve the Blackfeet community in all phases of the development and function of the proposed center. In order to attain the goal of capacity building, we will accomplish the following specific aims: 1. strengthen the research culture at BCC, 2. encourage and empower BCC students to pursue biomedical research careers, and 3. develop a sustainable BCC Mental Health Research Center at BCC. Previous NARCH funding focused only on capacity building but had significant impact at BCC, positioning us to develop the present proposal. Thus, this proposal leverages and expands previous successes. We expect that this proposal, if funded, would have even more impact, propelling BCC to our goal of enhancing Blackfeet mental health and developing a sustainable BCC-CCM.