University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics

Established in 2021 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and housed within the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the Center for Health Disparities Research (CHDR) is a cross-campus research center committed to advancing cutting-edge research, education, and clinical innovations toward the elimination of health disparities through greater alignment with mechanistic-focused health disparities research. Informed by modern disparities theory espoused by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), our work adopts a multidimensional and life-course based approach for advancing scientific solutions to ameliorate the conditions that contribute to health disparities. CHDR is a national leader in cutting-edge science aligned towards action, linking cells to communities towards real world intervention. Through the creation of a next-generation collaborative research infrastructure, CHDR provides a means by which to catalyze research, clinical innovation, and educational activities in mechanistic-focused health disparities research; deliver resources that address social-biological interactions, multi-level analytics, and mechanistic-focused system innovations; and accelerate the development of a robust, fully integrated health disparities research and practice community. This, in turn, is expected to unlock opportunities for the development of new therapies, precision medicine approaches, and interventions capable of addressing the consequences of health disparities and effectively targeting their complex causal foundations to bring the benefits of multi-level mechanistic health disparities research to all corners of the State in fulfillment of the Wisconsin Idea.