Center for Aging in Diverse Communities
The MERC Director is also Director of The Center for Aging in Diverse Communities (CADC). Several MERC faculty also serve as faculty in this Center. CADC was established at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1997. CADC is one of eighteen national Centers funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), National Institutes of Health's Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (RCMAR) program. The mission of the center is to decrease ethnic and racial disparities in health by focusing attention on healthy aging among older minority populations.
The center addresses this mission by serving as a catalyst for investigators conducting research that focuses on African American, Latino, Asian, and sexual and gender minority (SGM) older adults. We provide funding for new pilot studies and mentor underrepresented researchers, thereby increasing the number of researchers dedicated to improving the health of ethnically diverse older adults.
San Francisco State University
MERC faculty frequently support interns from San Francisco State University, Department of Health Education who are completing their undergraduate degree in Public Health. As part of their coursework, students are required to complete 240 hours of practice in the field of public health during their last semester. Interns are placed with various faculty at MERC where they are exposed to the daily operations of the organization and other public health skills such as research, evaluation, assessment, proposal development, planning, direct health education, and policy development.
UCPC Residency Curriculum
MERC faculty serve as core faculty and mentors for the UCSF Primary Care General Internal Medicine Residency Residents' Scholarly Projects (RSP) program. The bimonthly research conferences provide a didactic curriculum on research and scholarship as well as to provide a forum for works-in-progress discussions. Resident projects may include independent research, practice-based research, scholarly reviews, community projects, medical education research or quality improvement. Residents present their scholarship at the end-of-year Department of Medicine Research Symposium and/or at regional and national internal medicine meetings.
Pre-Health Undergraduate Program
The UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) Training Program offers a summer clinical research training program for up to 15-20 underrepresented minority undergraduate students who are planning to attend dental, medical, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, rehabilitation therapy, pharmacology or other professional schools after graduation, and who have an interest in a career in clinical research. Students are paired with a UCSF trainee who is enrolled in the Designing Clinical Research (DCR) course. The purpose of the course is to train students to evaluate the medical literature, to design clinical and translational research studies, and to encourage long-term collaborations between UCSF and undergraduate students.
Deep Explore
MERC faculty serve as research mentors for medical students participating in Deep Explore Inquiry. The Deep Explore, which can span from 12 to 20 weeks, comprises the major component of the Inquiry Curriculum during Career Launch. All UCSF medical students are required to complete a faculty mentored Deep Explore Project during this time in which they carry out a substantive scholarly exploration of a topic related to human health. In most cases, projects will require students to develop hypotheses or research questions, gather and analyze data, and derive and defend conclusions. The work can be done in any of the UCSF Six Domains of Science (Biomedical, Clinical, Social and Behavioral, Epidemiology and Population, Education, or Health Systems Sciences). Additionally, bioethics, public policy, or even creative writing or other artistic projects may be acceptable as long as they are thematically aligned with human health.
Healthforce Center at UCSF
Healthforce Center at UCSF is an organization dedicated to helping health care organizations drive and navigate change. Healthforce's rigorous and experiential leadership training programs transform participants into informed leaders. It's networks of community health leaders, clinicians and quality improvement leaders, increase capacity to provide effective, high quality care. Some of these programs include the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) Health Care Leadership Program, the California Improvement Network, and the Cedars-Sinai Community Clinic Initiative.