The Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University serves as the coordination center for the national Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) initiative, working in partnership with the University of New Mexico College of Population Health and the data and social-science organization Mathematica. This research program is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Common Fund.

The ComPASS Coordinating Center is led by principal investigators Amy Carroll-Scott, PhD, an associate professor and chair of Community Health and Prevention, Jan M. Eberth, PhD, a professor and chair of Health Management and Policy, and Ana V. Diez Roux, MD, PhD, MPH, distinguished university professor of Epidemiology and director of the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative.

The ComPASS program supports health equity research at 25 community-serving institutions that address underlying structural factors within communities that affect health -- often referred to as social determinants of health. These factors include access to education, healthy food, employment, transportation, and health care.

The ComPASS Coordinating Center at Drexel Dornsife directs the multiple components of the ComPASS Program through three interdependent cores:

• The administrative core is led by Carroll-Scott, Deiz Roux, and Eberth, along with Luis Arturo Valdez, PhD, an assistant professor in Community Health and Prevention and the Drexel Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program.
• The data core is led by Lindsay Shea, DrPH, director of the Policy and Analytics Center at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute and Amal Harati, PhD, a senior researcher at Mathematica.
• The research capacity building core is led by Jessie Kemmick Pintor, PhD, an assistant professor in the Health Management and Policy, along with Shannon Sanchez-Youngman, PhD, an assistant professor, and Nina Wallerstein, DrPH, a professor, both at the University of New Mexico.

The Drexel team’s work includes:

• Creation and facilitation of a national health equity research assembly
• Establishing communities of practice and related affinity groups to foster multi-sector collaboration and co-learning
• Coordinating annual meetings
• Oversight of data collection, harmonization, reporting, and sharing processes
• Delivery of expert-lead trainings, one-on-one and group consultations, and technical assistance for participating ComPASS organizations

The Coordinating Center serves as "the administrative and research backbone of the ComPASS Program, ensuring participating community-based organizations have the knowledge, skills, and supports necessary to successfully carry out their intervention research locally and collectively advance health equity," explains Dr. Eberth.

For more information about Drexel’s award (1U24NR021014-01), including full list of projects, read the NIH press release and ComPASS video.

News from the COMPASS Coordinating Center

Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health to Serve as National Coordinating Center for New NIH Community-led Health Equity Research Program

Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health received a $20 million award to be disbursed over five years from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Common Fund through the agency’s Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) program to study health equity solutions nationwide.