community engagement meeting
Community Engagement Studio
A Community Engagement and Dissemination Core will foster collaborations that promote community engagement in the design, dissemination, and implementation of research supported by the center, and provide community members and stakeholders with opportunities to shape the research agenda.
community panorama
Childhood Obesity in Low-income Families
Grow Well/Crecer Bien: Addressing Childhood Obesity in Low-income Families - This project’s goals are to better understand the relation of feeding styles and practices to infant growth and obesity and the role of multiple caregivers in infant feeding, and to translate this understanding to intervention components that promote healthy feeding.
Visit the project site
presenters in lecture hall
Investigator Development and Pilot Grants
Investigator development activities will train and support young investigators with pilot grant programs designed to assist researchers in obtaining preliminary data to support new proposals for extramural funding. Importantly, innovative didactic training will be provided in community-based research methods.
Salton Sea Panorama
Childhood Asthma and Environmental Exposures
Research Project 1: Disparities in environmental exposures and health impacts. This project is based on the premise that health disparities in the eastern Coachella Valley, especially with regard to childhood asthma within the Latino community, are significantly affected by differential chronic environmental exposures to aerosols originating at the Salton Sea.

Center for Health Disparities Research

The Center for Health Disparities Research at University of California, Riverside (HDR@UCR) is a research center that aims to develop a rich interdisciplinary and collaborative environment for training in and performing health disparities research, infusing community-engaged research methods into the academic culture, and equipping investigators with tools and training for effective community-based research.

The center brings together broad interdisciplinary approaches including environmental sciences, biomedical sciences, as well as social science methods to study health disparities.

Our training activities are available to graduate, postdoctoral, and new principal investigator development, as well as to established STEM researchers.

The center is funded by an award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), award number  U54 MD013368. Read the press release announcing the award.

2019 Grants Announced

On Dec 3, 2019, we announced our first round of grants. See the list of recipients here.

Talking About HDR@UCR

Read the full press release.

David Lo
HDR@UCR will use a community-based approach to assess and improve the health of underserved populations in inland Southern California. We think the knowledge the center produces will inform approaches to address health disparities that Latino communities and marginalized populations experience elsewhere in the country.
David Lo, M.D., Ph.D.
Center Director & Senior Associate Dean for Research in the School of Medicine
Juliette McMullin
The community-engaged approach shifts the research focus from research ‘on’ to research ‘with’ people and creates opportunities for biomedical and clinical researchers to frame problems from the perspective of what’s relevant and important to the community whose lives are impacted by our research.
Juliet McMullin, Ph.D.
Co-Director and Chair of Department of Anthropology
Bruce Link
The complex problems of health disparities require input from multiple perspectives. For this reason, HDR@UCR seeks to integrate social and environmental perspectives with biomedical approaches to achieve a more complete understanding of the sources and consequences of health disparities in inland Southern California.
Bruce Link, Ph.D.
Co-Principal Investigator and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Sociology

What We Do

Our initial focus is on health disparities among Latino/Hispanic communities in Inland Southern California. However, the overall objective of the Center is to build capacity in community-based health disparities research across all of the communities we serve. This is a rapidly growing and diverse region of more than 4.3 million people, with pronounced health disparities and also characterized by a severe shortage of healthcare professionals, particularly primary care physicians.

Funding Opportunities

The center features a variety of novel funding opportunities which are available to UCR graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty (clinical, basic sciences, and social sciences), and teams of researchers.

Learn more about Funding Opportunities