About Us

Mission

The South Texas Border Health Disparities Center focuses on enhancing the institutional capacity of UTPA researchers to conduct health disparities research with a particular emphasis on the prevention of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease among the largely Hispanic population along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Center hopes to achieve this objective through the development of the following areas.

• Research infrastructure
  • Enhance the capability of faculty members to undertake health disparities and health services research
  • Foster collaborations between UTPA faculty and other institutions of higher education at the regional level
  • Develop an information base of funding opportunities for health disparities research
  • Identify the type of research support services needed by faculty members (survey design, computational infrastructure, programs, databases, research assistants, data collection, etc.)
• Research
  • Develop one or two in-house research projects annually.
  • Provide seed funding for individual investigator developmental research projects (2-3 annual small grants of $10,000 to $15,000)
  • Establish a set of health disparities local data indicators
• Public information and community outreach (future planning phase)
  • Identify community partners
  • Provide a resource for community-based organizations (help in design and evaluation of projects, identification of funding resources)