How a $10 million endowment will help this Fort Worth center fight health disparities
The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth has received a $10 million endowment to research health disparities and recruit and retain faculty for that mission.
The Texas Center for Health Disparities at UNTHSC conducts research into health disparities, trains new investigators in health disparity research and conducts community outreach.
This is the second endowment given to the Health Science Center’s Institute for Health Disparities by the National Institutes of Health.
“It is really showing that [the National Institutes of Health] is recognizing all the things that are going on at the Health Science Center and supporting our activities,” said Dr. Jamboor K. Vishwanatha, vice president of the center’s Institute for Health Disparities and director and principal investigator of the Texas Center for Health Disparities. “The more successful we are, it will benefit our community here in Tarrant County as well as the Dallas-Fort Worth community.”
The Health Science Center has led the way with multiple programs that are calling out disparities, using artificial intelligence, or conducting mentoring and training.
The additional endowment will help recruit and retain faculty and PhD students and provide stipends for conducting research through programs established by the 2017 endowment that invest in three priority areas.
One trains future leaders in health disparity research by providing grantsmanship, mentorship and networking opportunities for junior faculty in minority health and health disparities.
The next focuses on recruitment, hiring and retaining diverse faculty in minority health and health disparity research.
The third focuses on increasing the diversity of the Health Science Center’s workforce through its scholars program. This helps annually recruit a new cohort of doctoral students from minority and underrepresented groups to focus on health disparities.
The new endowment will allow the Health Science Center to support more PhD students, from three to five students now to upwards of 10 students.
The endowment is for supporting salaries and scholarly work for PhD students and faculty. The endowment money will be invested by the Office of Institutional Advancement, and only the proceeds of the investment can be used for the center’s programs.
Vishwanatha said health disparities exist throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. There are communities where everyone doesn’t have the same opportunities to get health care, which leads to disparities and various chronic diseases.
“It is important for us to address these diseases with our community, as well as train our future physicians, to train our future researchers on how to address the disparities. And that is what we are doing in our center,” Vishwanatha said. “We are providing training, we are doing research, we are also engaged in our community addressing these issues of health disparities. And so, this endowment is giving us a sustained source of funding to address these issues in our community.”
