Assistant Professor Dr. Jada Brooks, PhD, MPSH, RN, FAAN, has been selected to receive a Solutions for Environmental Exposure-Influenced Disease (SEED) Award for the American Indian Women Mindfully Building Resistance to Environmental Adversities Through Healing Exercises (AIM to BREATHE) project. This 12-month (beginning on July 1, 2020) project, in the amount of $40,000, is supported by the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions (IEHS) and The UNC Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility (CEHS). The research team includes Dr. Brooks (PI) and Drs. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé, Giselle Corbie-Smith, and Radhika Dhingra. Through community-engaged participatory research, they will develop a culturally-acceptable intervention to promote cardiovascular health and characterize baseline psychological well-being and cardiometabolic markers of physiological and biological stress in American Indian women 18-50 years of age.
IEHS is a research institute aiming to “reduce the burden of environmentally-influenced disease in North Carolina, the U.S., and abroad and identify solutions that support environmental health resilience.” The SEED Program funds efforts to generate preliminary data for projects to seek external funding, and specifically focuses on “data driven approaches to identify underlying factors contributing to adverse health outcomes in vulnerable populations, as well as state-of-the-art science to identify solutions to those problems.”