The Health Equity Research Center—a Washington State University Grand Challenges initiative—is an interdisciplinary network of WSU faculty, staff, and students from multiple colleges and campuses interested in understanding the factors that promote health resilience and decrease health risks associated with poverty, discrimination, and poor access to health care.
HERC researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences; the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine; and the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences are dramatically increasing WSU’s capacity to examine how the biological and social determinants of health disparities interact, and how they can be addressed at the individual and community level.
An important element of our strategy is to investigate resilience factors that allow some individuals and communities to achieve good health despite significant adversity. The Center targets the intersecting issues of stress, nutrition, poverty, race, and health, which are identified as major priorities of the National Institutes of Health.
Our goal is to create the interdisciplinary collaborations necessary to make WSU a national leader in advancing opportunity and sustaining health through the elimination of health disparities.
Learn more about HERC >>
HERC is one of 6 major Grand Challenges projects invested in by the Office of Research and Office of the Provost in 2015. Learn more about these projects.
Community Partnership Seed Grants
A number of community-based organizations are partnering with HERC in research and externally funded projects that could significantly increase their abilities to fulfill their health care missions.