ARCC Dr. Virginia Bishop Community-Academic Research Partnership Award

This award acknowledges the efforts of the BE-LUNG Initiative: Building Capacity for a Community-Based Research Partnership to Optimize Physical Activity in Lung Cancer Survivors, an intervention to increase physical activity among lung cancer survivors in Chicago. This exemplary partnership between Gilda's Club Chicago, (led by Kathleen Boss, director of special initiatives) a community organization that supports individuals and their families and friends whose lives have been impacted by cancer, and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (led by Prakash S. Jayabalan, MD, PhD). The partnership also included the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University (led by Victoria Villaflor, MD). 

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This award acknowledges Cooking Up Health: Docs & Kids in the Kitchen, a partnership between Common Threads, a community organization fighting childhood obesity, and Northwestern’s Osher Center for Integrative Health. This exemplary partnership teaches Northwestern medical students about nutrition through the lens of culinary medicine, community health and hands-on cooking. The medical students then deliver the healthy habit messages to Chicago Public Schools elementary school children in underserved communities.

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This award acknowledges the efforts of the Pastors4PCOR (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research), or P4P, engaging faith-based communities in health research, a collaborative partnership of 12 churches serving underrepresented populations in Chicago and south suburban areas and their congregants, community health advocates, health system providers and academic health scientists.

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This long-standing exemplary partnership between the Center on Halsted and the IMPACT LGBT Health & Development Program at Northwestern University collaborates on research projects aimed at improving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health. The collaboration has resulted in interventions proven to reduce HIV risk behaviors, as well as new initiatives in the building out of co-branded research space at the center, a groundbreaking LGBT psychology training program and an annual LGBT research conference.

This long-standing exemplary partnership between Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Office of Student Health and Wellness and Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, and her team at Northwestern University has generated many successful projects and is leading to improved chronic disease reporting and verification for CPS students on asthma, food allergy and other health issues. CPS and Northwestern University are working together to accomplish mutually beneficial goals for their respective communities and the Chicago community at large.

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The Second Annual Community-Engaged Research Partnership Award Award acknowledged the efforts of South Asian Healthy Lifestyle Initiative (SAHELI), which focused on engaging South Asian (SA) immigrants in research to understand multiple determinants of health through use of custom lifestyle interventions. This project is led by Santosh Kumar and Promila Mehta, Metropolitan ASian Family Services (MAFS) and Namratha Kandula and Swapna Dave, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics in the Department of Medicine.

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• Watch a video of Namratha Kandula
• Watch a video of Swapna Dave

The inaugural Community-Engaged Research Partnership Award was presented to Kara Murphy, executive director of Access DuPage. Access DuPage, a collaborative effort established in 2001, is a model of strong community collaboration with thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations in DuPage County, including hospitals, physicians, local government, human services agencies, and community groups, providing access to medical services to the county's low-income, medically uninsured residents.

The award specifically acknowledged the efforts of the DuPage Patient Navigation Collaborative (DPNC). The collaborative, spearheaded by Murphy and Melissa Simon, MD, MPH, assistant professor in the departments of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Preventive Medicine, and Medical Social Sciences, with contributions by many other partners in DuPage and at Northwestern, formed a partnership in 2006 around a national National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study of patient navigators for low income women with abnormal breast or cervical cancer screening tests. This partnership led to a $2.4 million NIH funded five-year CBPR implementation study in 2008. The team, consisting of six bilingual, religiously and ethnically diverse navigators, has guided more than 450 uninsured women to follow-up abnormal cancer screens with less than five percent loss to follow-up. The DuPage partnership has extensive community input, including a 15-member community advisory board of committed social workers, health care providers and health centers, representatives from the Health Department, the American Cancer Society, and several well-known and trusted health activists from the DuPage community. The partnership has garnered two $100,000 NIH small research grants. And finally, the DuPage Collaborative is funded for a five-year NIH National Cancer Institute research grant disseminating and implementing a CBPR patient navigator intervention in Chicago’s Chinatown Community.