Grant Writing Resources—Department of Public Health
January 29, 2010
Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College
The mission of the Department is to improve health care and strengthen medical education by bringing the public health disciplines into the Medical College and NYPH System’s research, patient care, and teaching agenda. Our multidisciplinary faculty complement and strengthen the tripartite mission of the Medical College and Hospital to provide first-rate, high quality care for its patients and educate the next generation of physicians and medical scientists, and to advance the science and the art of medicine. We collaborate with fellow faculty and clinical investigators on biomedical and public health research, and assist the Hospital on the delivery, quality, and cost of care, as well as community outreach. Through our affiliations with major organizations in this country and throughout the world, and through our recognition from and ability to generate needed funding from major federal institutions, we have the opportunity to shape healthcare policy and influence the improvement and delivery of healthcare.In addition to its numerous and wide-ranging research projects, the department runs residency and fellowship programs in General Preventive Medicine,Public Health Research, and Healthcare Quality and Medical Informatics Research. Faculty in the department teach classes to medical students at Weill Cornell Medical College, as well as to residents, graduate students, and health professionals. The department also directs a variety of clinical programs in mental health and addiction psychiatry.To best accomplish its goals, the department has been organized into seven integrated divisions:
Division of Prevention and Health Behavior
The Division aims to promote good health and prevent diseases associated with unhealthy behaviors. It conducts research on health behaviors that contribute to major illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes, and develops programs that encourage children and adults to make healthy lifestyle choices. Issues targeted for study and intervention include smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity, and violence. Faculty also study psychological, gender, cultural, and socioeconomic aspects of health promotion and disease prevention.
Division of Community and Public Health Program
The Division studies and develops interventions to address important inadequacies in our health care system. It operates several clinics for opioid dependency and provides other mental health services. Faculty also conduct research in integrated treatment for patients with both substance abuse problems and hepatitis C or mental health issues. In addition, the Division is engaged in large-scale community outreach efforts to improve public health and reduce disparities in health status and health care.
Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research
The Division's mission is to improve the quality and effectiveness of medical care. Major areas of research include comparative effectiveness research; outcomes and cost-effectiveness of medical and orthopedic devices; and healthcare delivery system improvement.The Division houses the Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness, which conducts research related to the logistics of disease and disaster preparedness, as well as the distribution of medical treatment in under-resourced areas in Africa.
Division of Health Policy
This Division studies the efficient and equitable allocation of scarce health care resources, focusing on health care technology assessment and comparative effectiveness, disparities in treatment and preventive care, financing and reimbursement, and incentives for implementation of evidence-based practice. Areas of research include cost-effectiveness of and population variation in cancer treatment; cost-effectiveness and feasibility of diagnosing and treating infectious diseases such as HIV, hepatitis C, and syphilis; depression treatment in primary care and other medical settings; evaluating outcomes in total joint replacements; cost-effectiveness of drug dependency treatment; and evaluation and implementation of a variety of global health initiatives.
Division of Medical Ethics
This joint Division in the Departments of Medicine and Public Health conducts research in medical ethics and coordinates Weill Cornell's curricular activities in this area. Areas of scholarship include the integration of ethics into health services, outcomes, and policy research; research and advocacy to improve care of brain-injured patients; the ethics of clinical decision-making; the care of the terminally ill; and the ethical dimensions of clinical and basic science research. Research initiatives explore patients' needs for autonomy, appropriate care, and support; issues surrounding reproductive and genetic biotechnologies; and public health ethics and social justice. Division clinical faculty also run a clinical ethics service at the Hospital to help patients and their families make difficult care decisions. In the CTSC, the Division provides an Ethics Core to help ethicists from partner institutions to work together to facilitate, develop, and administer consultative, educational, and research programs across disciplines. This allows translational research teams to move beyond the regulatory framework to appreciate the deeper ethical implications of their work for science and the wider community. The Ethics Core includes a Research Ethics Consultative Service and a Research Participant Advocacy Program.
Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology:
The Division’s role is to support and encourage research at the medical college and to serve as an academic home for biostatistics and epidemiology. The Division’s other missions are to develop epidemiologic studies in various fields; to further epidemiologic methodology research; to train medical students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other research staff in the management of data, use of statistical software, and use of statistical methods; and to develop innovative statistical research methods guided by and benefiting clinical research projects. In addition, the Division provides assistance with study design, the presentation of empirical findings, development of grant proposals, and writing of manuscripts. The Division provides long-term services both internally and to outside organizations.Internal groups with short-term epidemiological and statistical needs can access the Division’s services through its Biostatistics and Epidemiology Core.External organizations can access short-term assistance through the Department’s Cornell Analytic/Consulting Services unit. The Division also runs the Research Design and Biostatistics Core (RDBC) of the CTSC, which provides biostatistical resources for the design and conduct of studies within the CTSC.
Division of Quality and Medical Informatics:
The mission of this joint Division in the Departments of Public Health and Pediatrics is to improve clinical quality and patient safety, particularly through the use of health information technology (health IT). The Division has expertise in multiple disciplines, including research methodology, clinical informatics, and quality improvement. Major projects include evaluation of health IT initiatives; study of effectiveness, comparative effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of health IT applications; and evaluation of healthcare delivery systems. The Division disseminates its findings across the institution in order to improve each patient’s experience at NYP/WC. Its teaching and mentoring activities include a fellowship program in Health Care Quality and Medical Informatics Research, funded in part through the Empire Clinical Research Investigator Program and through the Weill Cornell Medical College Dean’s Office. The Division houses the Health Information Technology Evaluation Collaborative (HITEC) for New York State, a formal academic collaborative recognized and funded by New York State for evaluating HEAL NY, a major New York State Health IT program.
Office space/Conferencing facilities:
In March 2009 the Department of Public Health moved its administrative offices to a new facility at 402 East 67th Street. The Department has three floors of office space at this location, which includes state-of-the-art technology for video- and teleconferencing in four conference rooms. Available equipment includes: Audio systems with bridge-line conferencing, HD flat panel monitors, Video conferencing systems, Telephone conferencing, Computer interfaces (wireless and wired network & local drive), DVD recorders, Touch-panel control systems, HD Projectors, HD Video conferencing, DVD players/recorders, Wireless microphones and lecterns for presenters/Ceiling microphone arrays for audience, HD flat panel monitors.
Computer Resources:
Currently, the computational resources serving the Department of Public Health consist of Windows XP IBM series 330/PIII server with 200GB storage space. The Weill Medical College Information Technologies and Services Department provides maintenance. Department faculty and staff are each equipped with Pentium IV processors or greater, WindowsNT and Microsoft Office Professional software, all of which are networked to both the departmental server and the college-wide network. Researchers are provided with statistical software packages such as Stata, SPSS-X and SAS. Computers are linked to either individual printers or HP laser jet network printers. A Xerox photocopying machine with color printing and scanning capability is also available. A state-of-the-art, high-speed research workstation is located on-site and is available to all researchers with links to our departmental server and statistical software. Digital duplicating equipment is providing on-site in departmental space with additional state-of-the-art duplicating capabilities provided by the College Office of Medical Art and Photography.
As a result of our telecommunication linkup with the medical college's mainframe and Academic Computing Services, research and administrative staff at the department have access to a host of online library resources. Additional benefits include full access to the Internet at 90 Megabits/second and Internet2 at 100 Mbits/second providing use of the World Wide Web and FTP (file transfer protocol server) which facilitates exchange of data files (and manuscripts) between collaborative research teams through the Internet and Internet2. Research faculty are also eligible for 25 GB of free space on the Medical College’s Office of Research and Sponsored Projects (RASP) server.
The medical college can access mainframes housed in Ithaca, NY, including the very secure and sophisticated computing system at Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER).Computation facilities at the main campus include an HP 9000 750 with HP/UX operating system and an IBM 3090 Virtual Machine with an MVS/XP operating system. Cornell has two IBM Sp1 supercomputers with large vectoring capacity for complex algorithms and matrix algebra (useful for structural equation modeling with large datasets). Electronic storage is provided by IBM magnetic tape readers for 6250 and 1600 BPI tapes as well as 9 track cartridge readers for compressed data storage.
Other Medical College and Affiliated Resources:
Library Resources:
Among the many information resources available to WMC students and faculty are the Samuel J. Wood Library and the C.V. Starr Biomedical Information Center. The library houses over 1,500 printed journals, over 4,800 electronic journals, and over 150,000 archived volumes. The library is fully automated, featuring computer terminals that provide access to library collections from any networked computer and student workstation throughout the College. In addition, the Nathan Cummings Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Hospital for Special Surgery, The Rockefeller University and Cornell University in Ithaca collaborate to share databases, journals, and resources, effectively expanding access to available information. The library offers a variety of services, including computer -generated literature searches, translations, and inter-library loans.Medical graphics and photographic/audiovisual facilities provide a wide range of art, photographic, and audio-visual services.
Clinical and Translational Science Center
The Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC) addresses the necessity of an integrated, comprehensive research support system that includes education, training and mentoring for clinical research investigators, coordinators and staff.The mission of the CTSC is to provide an environment that allows optimal use of our considerable multi-institutional assets and the diversity of our patient population to move translational research seamlessly from bench to bedside and to the community. The CTSC acts as a conduit through which essential resources, technological tools and education programs for all partners can be efficiently shared and managed.
Integral to Weill Cornell's Strategic Plan for Research, which was initiated seven years ago, the plan for the CTSC brought to fruition the integration of existing inter-institutional resources among neighbors on York Avenue and partner institutions in the immediate area. The resulting cluster of East Side institutions forms a unique and cohesive biomedical complex fulfilling the NIH roadmap initiative of breaking down institutional silos and barriers separating scientific disciplines to accelerate the clinical application of basic science discoveries.
This center is funded through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs), a national consortium that is transforming how clinical and translational research is conducted. For more information about the national CTSA consortium please visit ctsaweb.org.
Hospital Affiliation--NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital:
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is a 2,224 bed university teaching hospital based in New York City, jointly serving Weill Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. The Hospital provides state-of-the-art inpatient, ambulatory and preventive care in all areas of medicine at five major centers: Weill Medical College, Columbia University Medical Center in Northern Manhattan, Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian in Washington Heights and on the Upper East Side, the Allen Pavilion in the community of Inwood Manhattan, and the Westchester Division in White Plains, NY. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is the largest hospital in New York. The Hospital employs over 5,080 physicians holding faculty appointments at one or both medical schools and more than 14,700 non-physician healthcare providers and hospital employees. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is one of the most comprehensive health care institutions in the world, offering the latest advances in medical and computer technology to help ensure high quality, efficient, and cost-effective healthcare.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is also the flagship hospital of an extensive healthcare network, which consists of more than 150 participating organizations including 32 hospitals, 6 long-term care facilities, 12 home health agencies, 3 specialty institutes, and 97 ambulatory care centers. Through the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare Network, the Hospital and its affiliates provide the most comprehensive, high quality services to residents of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, as well as Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and several upstate
New York counties. More than 12,000 attending physicians provide care in the System. Each System member is an affiliate of either Weill Medical College or Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.