The Research to Reduce Disparities in Disease (R2D2)

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The seemingly immutable existence of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in cardiovascular disease is problematic. Medical doctors play an important role in the nation's health by treating the sick. Public health complements medicine by focusing on population health. Some argue that public health and medicine move in opposite directions but this is a false dichotomy. Despite billions of dollars spent on research and volumes of published studies, there is no consensus on why racial and ethnic disparities in CVDs such as hypertension have not been reduced. We seek to prepare a new generation of medical students from groups underrepresented in medicine to address CVD disparities through transdisciplinary research that combines the best of medicine and public health. The purpose of this proposal is to create a two-summer, developmental research program titled, The Research to Reduce Disparities in Disease (R2D2). The R2D2 program seeks to develop “hands-on” research skills of medical students at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine (MSU-CHM). It will train medical students to conduct community-based translational research on CVD health disparities. The mission is to create a research education program that will make MSU-CHM medical students more competitive for research-oriented residency programs. The Specific Aims are to: (1) Implement and evaluate a two-summer, developmental community-based public health research education program for a racially and ethnically diverse group of medical students. (2) Create two new summer “hands-on” research methods classes to increase practical research skills among medical students. (3) Recruit and select seven medical students each year, “ramping up” to 14 students in the program by the second year and maintain a total of 14 students in years two through five of the grant. (4) Train the selected students in community-based research methods, including the collection, entry, management, and analysis of data, as well as effective data presentation and visualization. (5) Pair each student with a funded faculty mentor who will supervise the student within a two-month community-based research project that will culminate in a paper submitted for publication. Medicine and public health are natural allies. However, they do not always work optimally together. Professional differences in training and perspectives have led to a false impression that public health professionals only work “upstream” on prevention while physicians are only concerned with “downstream” patient care. R2D2 will prepare medical students to conduct the transdisciplinary research needed to achieve health equity in cardiovascular diseases. We aim to train medical students who will bridge the boundary between medicine and public health. R2D2 medical students will hopefully, can bring the world of biomedicine and the world of psychosocial public health together, bringing biology into the community and the community into the clinic.