Burroughs Wellcome Fund Climate + Health Excellence (CHEX) Centers

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund announces the Climate + Health Excellence (CHEX) Centers award. This is a new institutional research and training opportunity that will help institutions bridge the gaps between fields that will have important roles to play in understanding the impacts of climate change on human health and diminishing their effects. This grant will support new discovery toward defining the health impacts of climate change, developing potential interventions, translating discovery science into practical application, and outward-facing work that can help public understanding of Climate + Health or strengthen connections between research and communities whose health has been harmed by climate change. Our goal is to help these Centers of Excellence achieve their strategic goals by supporting activities that help build stable collaborations between people, departments, and institutions. Building interdisciplinary connections between scholars, between approaches, and between researchers and those outside academe form the bulk of the budget.

The CHEX awards will provide up to $2,000,000 a year for five years. We anticipate that up to three awards will be made over three rounds of applications.

Creating new lines of research connecting climate change and human health will be the focal priority for the programs that are funded. There is ample room for building on institutional strengths to achieve this focus: institutional interests in planetary science, one health or planetary health, life science, engineering, physics and mathematical science, quantitative social sciences including public health, economics, and demographics, applied fields, and the arts and humanities can all drive dynamic work at the intersection of climate change and human health. Applications from groups that are just starting to integrate Climate + Health into their planning are expected to be uncompetitive. Proposals from consortia face a higher bar, as they need to demonstrate shared interests and convince reviewers that they will be able to overcome the challenges involved in working across multiple institutions.

Applications to CHEX must make clear the core problems on which the proposed Center will focus. Supported centers are expected to both launch what will become long-lasting research partnerships and to have well-planned training and post-graduate training components. The balance of these activities within any proposal are expected to vary depending on other resources available: for example, a university with generous resources already focused on faculty collaboration may have a proposal that leans more heavily toward training and providing small internal grants that stimulate new collaboration; a consortium bringing together research universities and primarily undergraduate institutions might submit a program that along with training and research puts substantial emphasis on teaching. A group concentrating its activities on connecting bench science and public health research might also propose putting resources into studying outreach to community groups and developing effective approaches to building better, more mutual conversations.

Post-graduate training and the curricular innovations that accompany are a necessary element and are seen as an important way to strengthen interdisciplinary connections. Programs may train PhD students, but may instead or additionally train postdoctoral fellows; medical or veterinary students, residents, or fellows; advanced nursing students; master’s students; undergraduates or other kinds of research trainees. We do not expect the bulk of this award to be spent on training. Trainees may be brought together across the spectrum from research to the clinic to the community or may be thoughtfully brought together across a range of sciences (including clinical science) that are concerned with Climate + Health. Applicants should develop a training program that fits their strengths and the goals of their proposed center. Planning to train simultaneously in all the directions described in this RFP is likely to yield a weaker proposal.

Education elements might involve work in K12 education, workforce-focused efforts focused on associate or bachelor’s degree-level education, or development of significantly new citizen science efforts that illuminate connections between climate change and human health. Some institutions will have appropriate on-campus partners for this work, but we expect many will partner with colleges of education, community colleges, undergraduate institutions including minority-serving colleges and universities, museums and science centers, and other education-focused organizations. Communications elements might include work focused on formal communication—for example, journalism; two-way communication between public health or research practitioners and communities adversely affected by climate change; collaboration with arts organizations; public outreach (“explaining” science to the public), and citizen science. As noted above, the depth of proposed work in education or communication is more important for selection than trying to do a little of everything.

The goal is better connecting research and communications or education by building robust bridges between departments, centers, and Schools, including those that have not been highly connected to health and medicine or public health in the past. Competitive institutions or consortia will be those whose culture encourages and enables collaboration across administrative units both in research and in spreading factual information about science, whether through education, public communication, or developing respectful approaches to dialogue with those whom climate change has brought harm.