The NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center (NYU-CUNY PRC), a partnership between NYU Langone and the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, aims to provide training, technical assistance, and subject matter expertise to our local stakeholders and colleagues across the center network. We deliver training to a broad range of audiences, including college, graduate, and postgraduate students; community leaders and advocates; health professionals; and researchers. Our training initiatives help translate applied public health research to improve population health.

Training for Students

Practical work experience is an essential part of the training of public health professionals. Our center offers carefully planned, highly supervised, and critically evaluated student training programs in collaboration with the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health within the Section for Health Equity. All students work in close collaboration with community and academic advisors on activities critical to the function and mission of the NYU-CUNY PRC.

Health Disparities Research Training Program

The Health Disparities Research Training Program, a core training initiative of the Section for Health Equity, provides highly qualified masters and doctoral students with an intensive two-semester experience working on a community-based participatory research project. Through this hands-on experience, students develop a deeper understanding of culturally and linguistically appropriate approaches to research, outreach, community partnerships, and care delivery in Asian American and other racial and ethnic minority populations.

Training for Community Leaders and Advocates

Our center offers trainings for community health workers and community-based organizations through the Community-Empowered Research Training program to ensure community involvement and input in all stages of the research process.

Community Health Worker Training

We offer technical assistance on training community health workers in partnership with various stakeholders across our network. We have facilitated efforts in training these frontline public health workers, who have such varied titles as outreach workers, community aides, community health advisors or representatives, promotores(as) de salud, and lay health workers. We can work with your organization to design training programs that best fit your particular needs. Our center has also developed numerous tools and resources for training community health workers in collaboration with NYU Langone’s Community Service Plan. Learn more about our community health worker toolkit.

Community-Empowered Research Training for Directors and Managers

The Community-Empowered Research Training (CERT) program is an academic–community partnership dedicated to strengthening community leadership in research. Geared toward executive directors and program directors and managers, CERT offers free workshops and webinars to strengthen the capacity of community-based organizations to participate in and develop community-focused research initiatives.

Aligned with the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health and other NYU and external community partners, the overall goal of the CERT program is to increase racial and ethnic diversity in the field of research and community health by encouraging community-based organizations to engage in research as a means of eliminating health disparities and contributing to the national dialogue on community health.

Training for Health Professionals and Researchers

We provide a variety of trainings to health professionals and researchers through three unique initiatives, the Community Engagement and Population Health Research program of NYU Langone’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), the Comparative Effectiveness and Implementation Research Training Program, and on the use of select datasets to study health disparities in New York City.

Community Engagement and Population Health Research Program

NYU Langone’s CTSI provides a variety of trainings to health professionals and researchers. The Community Engagement and Population Health Research (CEPHR) program collaborates with community members, researchers, health and social service providers, community-based organizations, academic investigators, and policymakers working to advance research that identifies and disseminates relevant and effective strategies to optimize personal and population health while reducing and eliminating health inequities. Our center works closely with the CEPHR program to support translational research through training, conferences, and symposia.

Comparative Effectiveness and Implementation Research Training Program

Comparative effectiveness research enables clinicians, public health professionals, and policy makers to get more benefit from our healthcare and public health systems by identifying which interventions work best for whom given intervention effectiveness, risk, and value. Implementation science complements this by increasing the uptake of evidence based practices by making the “right” thing also the easy thing to do. The Comparative Effectiveness and Implementation Research Training (CEIRT) Program, with training and mentorship in CEIRT since 2010, trains research-oriented predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows and academic faculty from across NYU Grossman School of Medicine, other NYU schools and colleges, and other New York City institutions.

The CEIRT program produces researchers who can identify the best choices for improving population health—from screening and surveillance programs to preventive interventions, diagnostic approaches, and treatments. We have the unique advantage of being housed within the Department of Population Health’s Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Decision Science, an academic home at NYU Langone dedicated to the fields that we teach.

New York City Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

In 2015, investigators from our center provided local health department researchers and CUNY faculty with basic analytic tools for analyzing new population health data about chronic diseases from the New York City Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NYC HANES). The leading research team of both institutions involved in the survey, CUNY and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, conducted two in-person trainings for researchers of both institutions. The training materials are now publicly accessible as part of NYC HANES’s data resources.

CUNY Public Health Innovations Program

Many growing, global health issues require innovative public health approaches which focus on prevention of disease and promotion of community health. Traditional grant-based and public-sector funding methods, however, often lead to unsustainable, small-scale solutions. At the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, we believe that integrating public health with social entrepreneurship can provide more agile, sustainable business models to create and scale up innovative public health solutions. To achieve this, the NYU-CUNY PRC partners with the CUNY Center for Systems and Community Design and Firefly Innovations on a number of innovation-related programs.

Public Health Innovation Accelerator and Incubator

The Public Health Innovation Accelerator helps entrepreneurs, students, faculty, staff, and the broader NYC community generate and scale ventures to create community wellbeing, with sustainable environmental, social, and economic impact across multiple United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Through the incubator program, teams receive personalized mentorship, access to our public health innovation network, and research and design support. The incubator program helps early-stage companies create and scale social, environmental, and economic impact.

Hackathons

We host regular hackathons, bringing together innovators from diverse fields to share ideas and expertise, rapidly turn ideas into potential solutions, and develop novel strategies to address a range of pressing public health concerns.

Systems Change Lecture and Workshop Series

The Systems Change Series is a monthly lecture and workshop series co-hosted by the NYU-CUNY PRC and the CUNY Center for Systems and Community Design that creates space for distinguished scholars, practitioners, and entrepreneurs across a broad range of sectors to share the ways in which they work at the forefront of incorporating systems and design thinking into their respective practices.

Transdiciplinary Research Collaborators and Mentors

Using our strategic science capabilities as an academic institution, we help entrepreneurs test and iterate their solutions, and design and evaluate pilot studies. By bringing together various disciplines, we create public health solutions that are more dynamic, effective, and sustainable.

Public Health Entrepreneurship Academic Curriculum

Entrepreneurship education is a new and exciting direction for public health. More public health students want to generate financially sustainable social impact and move from discussing problems to generating solutions. At CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, we have a growing public health entrepreneurship curriculum. Current course offerings include Design and Business Thinking for Public Health, which demonstrates how user-centered design creates value for the entire public health ecosystem. Students learn and apply design methods in real-life public health contexts, framing challenges, observing users, identifying needs, developing concepts, and iteratively testing and defining the opportunity.

Contact Us

For more information about the NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center, please email us at nyu.cuny.prc@nyulangone.org.