Photo: Bryan Goodchild
The Prevention Research Center at UMass Chan Medical School has been awarded a new five-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, funding new projects to promote health and prevent chronic illness and disability.
“The Prevention Research Center has more of a defined focus this round, specifically looking at the built environment and physical activity, and working with community partners to promote better conditions for walking, biking and active transportation using mobility-assisted devices,” said Stephenie C. Lemon, PhD, MS, the Barbara Helen Smith Chair in Preventive & Behavioral Medicine and professor of population & quantitative health sciences.
Dr. Lemon is co-director of the center with Milagros C. Rosal, PhD, MS, the Imoigele P. Aisiku, MD’97 Chair in Health Equity and Diversity and professor of population & quantitative health sciences.
The Prevention Research Center is part of a national network of 20 academic research centers that conduct community-partnered research.
Karin Valentine Goins, MPH, research program manager in the Department of Population & Quantitative Health, leads the dissemination and translation component of the Prevention Research Center and directs one of the new programs, the Neighborhood Connect research project.
“Ten people in Worcester were killed last year in pedestrian accidents. It reflects a national problem: more than 40,000 people died on U.S. roadways in 2023 [from all travel modes]. More than 7,500 of those deaths were pedestrian deaths,” said Goins.
But, Goins said, “Now the approach is going to be about how do you build in safety and how do you build in opportunity to travel without a vehicle.”
According to Goins, the city has received a federal grant to develop a safety action plan and has become more strategic. Neighborhood Connect aims to work with residents and the city to develop solutions for people walking, rolling and biking to get to everyday destinations like school, stores or work.
Community partners in Neighborhood Connect are the Worcester Division of Public Health, which will lead overall intervention delivery and strengthen engagement with fellow agencies; the Coalition for Healthy Greater Worcester, which will recruit and support neighborhood leads; and WalkMassachusetts, which will deliver the walk audit training to neighborhood teams.
“We are creating an infrastructure as part of Neighborhood Connect, creating a model by which people can exert change in government to improve their neighborhoods,” said Dr. Rosal.
While Neighborhood Connect is local, the Prevention Research Center has partnerships across the country. The renewed grant includes funding for the center’s role as co-leader with the University of Illinois Chicago and West Virginia University of the Physical Activity Policy and Research Evaluation Network, a national collaborative space for researchers, planners, health professionals and others to address key evidence gaps, and is the research partner of the CDC’s Active People, Healthy Nation initiative.
Another new project is establishing the Advancing Research in Immunization Services Center for Rural Vaccination at UMass Chan, led by Grace W. Ryan, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of population & quantitative health sciences. UMass Chan researchers are partnering with the New England Rural Health Association for community outreach and engagement.
The project brings together a focus on rural communities and peer-to-peer messaging to support vaccine uptake.
“Public health and communication researchers haven’t gotten a great handle on how to use social media in a way that resonates with people, so that’s a big focus of this grant,” Dr. Ryan said. “When we look at rural health, people have a tendency to take what works in other areas, often big academic urban medical centers. We really need different kinds of approaches to understand the context better.”
Lemon said, “One thing that we’ve learned, without fail, is that any time we conduct work that’s focused on behavioral change, context is key. Simply providing counseling or a knowledge-based approach is just not enough.”
