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.
When HERC was established, the first goal was to support research.
Affiliates of HERC have independent and established research programs aimed directly at understanding the multifaceted and intersectional determinants of health disparities as well as understanding resiliency.
Our focus in this effort is on the crucial roles that social and economic disadvantages, chronic stressors, and poor nutrition play across multiple health problems—both physical and mental—in disadvantaged populations and across multiple units of analysis, including individual, family, and community. Importantly, stress and nutritional challenges have consistently been associated with poor health outcomes among historically underserved populations, especially as they magnify risk factors and decrease both individual and communal resilience. Rarely, however, have these problems been addressed comprehensively across multiple dimensions.