The Drew/UCLA Export Center builds upon a long tradition of collaboration between Drew and UCLA, close involvement with the minority communities, substantial success in training minority investigators in disparities research, and a distinguished record of scholarship in the area of disparities. The Center will address health disparities in the largest and one of the most diverse counties in the United States. The Center will emphasize diabetes mellitus and mental health and illness in Latinos and African Americans in its initial years, but eventually will address disparities in other conditions and, possibly, other ethnic/racial groups. The Center is organized into seven cores: (1) an Administrative, Planning and Evaluation Core, which will be direct the Center, select Center participants, supervise evaluation of all Center activities, select pilot projects, coordinate relationships to the External Advisory Board and Community Advisory Board and manage of budgets and reports; (2) a Training and Mentorship Core, which will recruit and mentor minority junior investigators in the areas of disparities and minority health, providing them with individualized curricula, career guidance and supervision; (3) a Community Outreach/Information Dissemination Core, which will disseminate culturally-sensitive health information to low-income Latinos and African Americans and evidence-based health care information to their providers, partner with communities to engage community members in research, and provide mentorship to junior faculty in community-based research activities; (4) a Research Core that will translate an intervention of proved efficacy for lowering the incidence of diabetes mellitus through weight loss into a form that will be acceptable to and useful in low-income minority populations (initially Latinos); (5 and 6) two Shared Resources Cores, that will bring state-of-the-art instruments, study designs and analytical methods to the research activities of Center investigators; and (7) a Pilot Projects Core that will fund pilot projects in the area of disparities for Center Investigators, giving highest priority to the substantial number of promising junior investigators in the Center and its sponsoring institutions. The Center has established milestones for evaluation to assure that the Center's resources are optimally applied to addressing the major problems facing the nation in the area of disparities in health and health care.
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