The All of Us Research Program is proud to support the Black Resilience and Health Research event as part of Madison’s Juneteenth celebration.
The event will feature keynote speaker, Dr. Karriem Watson, who will discuss the All of Us program and the critical need to address health disparities in health research.
Three Wisconsin based medical and scientific organizations – Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and Medical College of Wisconsin – have collectively been awarded $5,360,832 to help implement in Wisconsin the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) All of Us Research Program that aims to benefit communities across the country.
These institutions will partner with BloodCenter of Wisconsin and regional Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) to aid in engagement and recruitment of research participants.
The All of Us Research Program is an ambitious nationwide effort to advance research into precision medicine, an approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in biological makeup, environment and lifestyle for each person. The Wisconsin awardees will use their collective resources to enroll interested individuals and gather health information to help researchers understand how these factors can help determine how to best prevent or treat disease. The goal of the NIH All of Us Research Program is to gather health data from more than 1 million people living in the U.S.
The Wisconsin program will represent the collaborative efforts of three fully-integrated regional healthcare systems to form a virtual state-wide integrated delivery network. Together, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and Medical College of Wisconsin will cover 173 clinics, 13 hospitals and five Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). BloodCenter of Wisconsin will educate and engage its thousands of blood donors for potential involvement in the program.
About Dr. Karriem Watson
Dr. Karriem Watson, DHSc, MS, MPH, is a Senior Research Scientist with the University of Illinois Cancer Center and the Director of Community Engaged Research for the UI Cancer Center at UIC and the Mile Square Health Center, a group of Federally Qualified Health Clinics (FQHCs) affiliated with the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System. Dr. Watson has a Doctorate in Health Science in Global Health and a Master of Science in Basic Medical Research and a Master’s in Public Health in Community Health Sciences. Dr. Watson’s work has resulted in the creation of community based cancer screening, prevention and navigation programs for breast, lung, colorectal, cervical and prostate cancer. His work to support community based breast cancer screening and navigation afforded him recognition by the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force as a “Community Champion”. He is a faculty member at the UIC School of Public Health in the Division of Community Health Sciences and is an Adjunct Faculty at DePaul and Northwestern University. Dr. Watson is also the Core Co-Lead of the Community Engagement Core for a 5 year NCI funded multi-institutional grant with the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Cancer Center and Northeastern Illinois University to address cancer disparities in Chicago, he also serves as Co-Investigator for a 4 year NCI funded grant to develop a partnership with the UI Cancer Center and Governors State University to increase the number of faculty and students from underserved communities who engage in cancer disparities research. Dr. Watson is also a Co-Investigator of the Illinois Precision Medicine Consortium that was funded by the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative, now called the All of Us Initiative and a newly awarded NIMHD Center of Excellence in Health Disparities at UIC.