April 27, 2013

Welcome! IWRI’s First Quarterly Newsletter as a Center of Excellence

As Director of the Indigenous Wellness Research Center (IWRI), I am humbled and honored to announce that we were awarded a National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) Comprehensive Center of Excellence grant in September 2012.  This extremely competitive, 5-year, $5 million grant would never have been awarded to IWRI without the steadfast support and goodwill of our tribal community partners and our academic allies.  The funding will allow IWRI to increase its capacity to further its overarching goal of improving American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) health and eliminate health disparities through the following four aims:

1.   Develop an integrated, comprehensive, and centralized trans-disciplinary research infrastructure that builds on the successes of IWRI’s research, training activities, and community capacity building;
2.   Cultivate existing and establish new innovative partnerships with AIAN tribal communities and other AIAN organizations to facilitate truly collaborative research;
3.   Develop new and enhance existing research training activities at IWRI that prepare researchers to conduct scientifically rigorous and culturally grounded health research; and
4.   Strengthen and consolidate AIAN engagement, outreach and institutional partnerships.

To accomplish the four aims, the grant funds the establishment of four “Cores”:  (1) Administrative, (2) Research, (3) Research Education and Training, and (4) Community Engagement and Outreach.
This inaugural quarterly newsletter is one product of the National Center of Excellence funding.  We hope to inform and engage our audience, which ranges from local tribal communities, to our University of Washington partners and other academic institutions, to federal funding agencies, to indigenous and allied partners across this country and across the ocean.