During the review process, reviewers will be assigned no more than two grant proposals and invited to attend a study section, scheduled on Tuesday, April 19^th, 2022, from 11 am to 1 pm. An academic reviewer will be designated the primary reviewer and will be asked to briefly present the proposal at the virtual study section in 2-3 minutes, followed by comments from the secondary academic reviewer and community reviewer, along with a group discussion.

Should you be interested in participating as a reviewer please email Grace Figuereo at grf7002@med.cornell.edu by Monday, April 4, 2022.

We are preparing for the spring semesters of Dialogues in Health sessions which is for premedical students from our linkage partners which includes Cornell University. Virtual sessions will be held Wednesday evening on April 6, 20, and 27. Faculty and trainees that are available to volunteer and share their journey to medicine with pre-medical students can email dcoe@med.cornell.edu. 

A team of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine faculty members have been awarded a 2022 Cornell Center for Health Equity Community Partnership Building Grant from the Cornell Center for Health Equity. Community partnership building grants are designed to establish or strengthen collaborative partnerships that will enable meaningful involvement of community stakeholders in health equity research. The group, led by Karla Hanson, Professor of Practice, Department of Public & Ecosystem Health, is one of two awardees this year. Project team members also include:

With this grant, the research team aims to: 1) Better understand patient/client engagement and care coordination strategies and data systems and capabilities of each partner organization. 2) Develop feasible, viable, and sustainable recommendations for improvements in engagement, care coordination, and data sharing. 3) Position the collaborative team to conduct robust research on implementation.

An Engaged Research Grant from the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement is supporting the inclusion of 13 undergraduate research assistants whose majors include: Biological Sciences; English; Government; Human Biology, Health and Society; Information Science; and Sociology. This spring students are job shadowing and interviewing frontline staff from each organization. This qualitative data collection will continue into the summer with semi-structured interviews with the executive leadership at each partner organization led by Grace Marshall and Kally Wang. Also over the summer, three students will be trained in qualitative data analysis so that they may assist in coding and presenting data. Descriptive coding will be applied to transcripts and then Cornell researchers will engage the project team in grounded interpretation of data. This analytic process will yield recommendations for system improvements to enhance collaboration to address social determinants of health and will suggest approaches to research their implementation. To date, most implementation research on cross-sector collaborations has emphasized partnerships in urban areas, therefore this Partnership Building grant positions the research team to conduct future work to fill an important gap in knowledge.

Medicaid is the single largest insurer in the United States and disproportionately provides health care coverage for members of minoritized racial and ethnic groups. Due, in part, to its federalist structure, Medicaid is both a source of inequity in the U.S. health care system, as well as a potential policy lever for achieving equity. In this seminar, Dr. Schpero will discuss three ongoing projects that examine how Medicaid mediates disparities in medical innovation, access to care, and hospital financing. These projects identify opportunities for federal and state policymakers to leverage the Medicaid program to improve health equity in the United States.

Dr. William Schpero is an assistant professor in the Division of Health Policy and Economics of the Department of Population Health Sciences at the Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University. A health economist, Dr. Schpero studies Medicaid policy and the financing and delivery of care for low-income populations. His research focuses broadly on identifying and testing policy levers that can be used to address racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health and health care. His work has appeared in a number of academic journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Health Affairs. It has been featured by Bloomberg, CNBC, Politico, The Washington Post, and other news outlets.

The next CAPS (virtual) seminar is this Friday, with David Rehkopf, Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and in the Department of Medicine in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford School of Medicine. Rehkopf’s research is focused on understanding the health implications of the myriad of decisions that are made by corporations and governments, every day – decisions that profoundly shape the social and economic worlds in which we live and work. His work demonstrates the health implications of corporate and governmental decisions that can give the public and policy makers evidence to support new strategies for promoting health and well-being.

The Medicaid Insights Colloquium, or MIC, is a virtual series that features current Medicaid research and key topics in Medicaid policy.

Dean Schillinger, MD, is an internationally recognized health communication scientist and expert in chronic disease prevention and control. He directs the UCSF Health Communications Research Program, serves as site director for an NIDDK Center for Diabetes Translational Research, and is Principal Investigator for CDC- and NIH-funded projects in diabetes-related policy, as well as a NIH project to develop measures of health literacy using computational linguistics and machine learning. A public health and primary care physician, he served as Chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) from 2009-2020. Dr. Schillinger currently co-chairs a subcommittee of a federal advisory commission related to harmonizing diabetes policy across federal agencies (https://health.gov/our-work/health-care-quality/national-clinical-care-commission). In 2006, he co-founded the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, whose mission is to promote the health of vulnerable populations through discovery, collaboration, advocacy and policy change.

As part of the UCSF Global Health Sciences Institute, Dr. Schillinger collaborates with colleagues at INSP and UNAM in Mexico to co-direct the UC-Mexico Diabetes Public Health Research Initiative. He also directs the UCSF Global Health Sciences Masters course on NCDs. Dr. Schillinger has been instrumental in local public health regulation of sugary drinks, and served as the scientific expert for the City and County of San Francisco in defense of a lawsuit filed in Federal Court by the American Beverage Association for an injunction against the City’s ordinance to mandate health warning labels on billboards advertising sugary drinks. From 2018-21, Dr. Schillinger served as co-chair for a federal diabetes commission; his efforts led to a report that contains transformative recommendations for an all-government, trans-sector response to the epidemic. He also co-created a youth-led diabetes prevention social media campaign called The Bigger Picture Campaign, http://thebiggerpictureproject.org/, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, NIMHD, and The California Endowment. The Bigger Picture has received numerous film and media awards, and received the 2014 Latino Coalition for a Health California Award for Youth Leadership and the Spirit of 1848 Social Justice Award from the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the 2015 UC-Community Partnership Award. In 2016, Dr. Schillinger was honored with a James L Irvine California Leadership Award for his innovative work in to improve public health literacy and address the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes. This led to the scaling of The Bigger Picture campaign with 8 spoken word programs across California; youth poets of color and their poems were recently highlighted in a 2018 JAMA publication and an associated New York Times feature story. He was recently featured in a PBS documentary, "Blood Sugar Rising," and an Arte documentary aired in Europe, "Un Monde Obèse," which together have been viewed by over 12 million people.

Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton University

Join Dr. Keith Wailoo as he tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted- and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day.

Dr. Keith Wailoo is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Department of History and the School of Public and International Affairs. His books include Dying in the City of the Blues, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line, and Pain: A Political History. Dr. Wailoo won the 2021 Dan David Prize for his “influential body of historical scholarship focused on race, science, and health equity; on the social implications of medical innovation; and on the politics of disease.”