RECENT and ONGOING ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Building on our tobacco and marijuana prevention efforts with young Black men, the Center for Health Equity Research was awarded a second grant from the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program for the proposed study, Is marijuana the new menthol? Can marijuana use among young Black men serve as a hook for nicotine addiction?

The 2-year Pilot Research Award starting in July 2022, will use a mixed methods approach to explore nicotine exposure resulting from the mixture of tobacco and marijuana, which is typical of certain marijuana use methods such as blunt smoking, and assess the levels of awareness of this risk among marijuana-using young Black men.

Marijuana joints vs. menthol cigarettes

CHER was awarded a 3-year, $1.1 million High Impact Research Award from the Tobacco-Related Diseases Research Program to develop and test individual and community-level strategies to reduce cannabis and tobacco use among young Black men who are at risk for HIV in Long Beach and surrounding Los Angeles County areas.  Interventions used in five of our HIV prevention studies have been designated Evidence-Based Behavioral Interventions (EBIs) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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CHER was awarded a five-year, $1.93 million grant by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) in 2016 to create the CHER Institute, designed to increase the number of early career faculty members with an emphasis on faculty from Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) who are better prepared to become NIH principal investigators in the field of community-based health equity research; and Increase the quantity and quality of health equity research targeting vulnerable ethnic minority populations.

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