Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provides $2 million grant to support UCLA’s efforts to expand community health partnerships
University team’s leaders include UCLA Fielding School of Public Health faculty Drs. Wendelin Slusser, Michael Ong, and Burt Cowgill.
The UCLA Semel Healthy Campus Initiatives Center has received a $2 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to expand partnerships with community organizations by aligning research and lived experiences around well being.
“As we were thinking about ways to address these pervasive community health challenges, our community partners kept coming back to the need to translate data into real-life stories,” said Associate Vice Provost Dr. Wendelin Slusser, grant co-investigator, professor in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's Department of Community Health Sciences, and clinical professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “This project is designed to bring to life and address the day-to-day health and wellbeing challenges, as well as highlight the wins for our community partners.”
Slusser is joined by UCLA Fielding’s Dr. Burt Cowgill, an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management and a faculty member at the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity, who serves as co-principal investigator (PI) on the grant, and Dr. Michael Ong, a physician and professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, who is a co-investigator.
“This grant is a game changer for advancing health equity,” said Dr. A. Janet Tomiyama, professor of psychology and principal investigator of the grant. “It underscores the vital intersection between research and real-world impact - where evidence-based strategies meet community-driven solutions.”
