Bruce Alexander
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Heat waves, floods, wildfire smoke and drought affect health, but most research on these links has focused on cities and coasts where data are plentiful. Rural communities and American Indian communities in the Upper Midwest have been studied far less, even though they face persistent gaps in health care access and health infrastructure.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Earth & Environmental Science
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
climate change and health
American Indian health
rural health
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Build regional capacity for climate and health research by linking multidisciplinary expertise and institutional partnerships to questions that align with the stated priorities of American Indian and rural communities in the Upper Midwest.
- Establish a Community Engagement Core that co-develops the research agenda with American Indian and rural community partners while following culturally safe research practices.
- Evaluate how extreme weather events affect health in American Indian and rural populations using a new data resource drawn from a multi-system electronic health records consortium.
- Launch a Pilot Project and Emerging Issues program that funds rapid studies responding to stakeholder priorities and grows them into larger research collaborations.
More about the research
Loss and deterioration of land also carries a mental dimension sometimes called ecological grief, which is believed to be linked to mental health conditions, substance use, obesity and chronic disease in American Indian communities. The central question is how a changing climate affects health in these specific populations, and what practical adaptation measures follow from the answer.
Why it matters
Rural and American Indian populations in the Upper Midwest bear climate-related health burdens that existing research, concentrated in urban and coastal settings, has largely missed. By linking extreme weather exposures to health outcomes in pooled electronic health records and by setting the research agenda with communities themselves, this center could identify who is most at risk and support concrete, culturally grounded adaptation measures and health infrastructure planning in the region.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jani Ingram
Northern Arizona University, AZ·Public Health & Epidemiology
Engage in bidirectional communication with American Indian and Alaska Native community partners, grounded in mutual exchange of perspectives, to set research priorities and promote best practices for cancer health.
Monica Skewes
Montana State University, MT·Psychology
Test whether Indigenous Recovery Planning, a culturally adapted Relapse Prevention treatment, increases percent days abstinent among 150 Fort Peck tribal members with substance use disorder, compared with a waitlist control group.
Laura James
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, AR·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop, demonstrate and share translational science innovations that make it easier to move research through several stages of the clinical and translational research spectrum.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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