The Health Disparities Research Center of Excellence (HDRCOE) uses a public health exposome approach which considers the mechanisms and pathways through which the built, natural, policy and social environments affect personal health outcomes and population level disparities across the life course.

Our center promotes and guides innovative, multi-level, transdisciplinary and community-engaged research to improve the health status and reduce disparities among poor, medically underserved, and disenfranchised populations of Tennessee and other similar communities.

It is our mission to eliminate health disparities, promote health equity, inform public policy, and transform public health practice. We plan to accomplish these goals through the advancement of team science and academic community partnerships, the application of computational methods and big data analytics, geographic information systems and spatial temporal analysis through an exposome lens.

Paul Juarez, PhD, director