Centers, Institutes, & Initiatives

The CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute provides evidence to inform urban and municipal food policy, making equitable access to healthy, affordable food a priority; promoting intersectoral perspectives that link nutrition, health, and sustainable community and workforce development; and engaging CUNY faculty and students in food policy research and action.

The central mission of the CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (ISPH) is to translate research into sustainable, cost-effective population-level interventions, strategies, initiatives, and policies with the potential to improve health and reduce health disparities at scale around the world. We do this by understanding biological mechanisms, subtypes and major drivers of disease, identifying program/service/policy implementation gaps driving suboptimal health outcomes at the population level, and by designing and conducting rigorous experimental and observational studies of the impact of strategies aimed at improving population health outcomes. We rigorously assess the effectiveness of these strategies when implemented at scale. Given that many forces shape population health, including those outside the health sector (e.g., political, economic, sociologic, environmental, demographic), we seek and generate knowledge, collaboration and expertise to achieve our mission of improved population health through better implementation.

The Center for Immigrant, Refugee, and Global Health (CIRGH) is committed to addressing complex transnational public health issues affecting urban cities and beyond with an emphasis on closing the health disparity gap in underserved communities. To successfully address these challenges, the field requires innovative ways of framing transnational health issues, new tools with which to measure magnitudes and impacts, and new strategies to address them at community, national and international levels.

Healthy CUNY is a collaboration with the University Student Senate. Designed by CUNY students, faculty and staff, the goal is to make the City University of New York the healthiest urban university in the United States. Acknowledging the strong connection between educational achievement and health, Healthy CUNY seeks to ensure that students leave college healthier, and better able to protect their future health, than when they entered.

The Center for Innovation in Mental Health (CIMH) is an academic training and research center that promotes the reach and adoption of effective mental health interventions through research, evaluation, training, and policy. CIMH engages in local and global efforts to advance mental health service and research to improve access and quality of mental health care. Based at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, the Center builds on a wealth of scholarly and practical expertise within the university, advisory board members, and collaborators.

The Center for Systems and Community Design seeks to serve as a hub of research excellence and innovation in health promotion and disease prevention through systems and community design. The mission of the Center is to develop and test innovative strategies for effective, sustainable systems and community change to transform health. In order to achieve this, the Center aims to understand the important interdepencencies, structures, and goals inherent in complex organizational and community systems underlying health and, is founded on the principle that a solution-oriented complex systems approach is necessary for achieving lasting, transformative health and for improving health equity within New York City and beyond.

The Center for Advanced Technology and Communication in Health (CATCH), an interdisciplinary center located at CUNY SPH, aims to fulfill the need for new technology and communication approaches that help decision makers better understand and tackle systemic, deep-rooted issues in health. As we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, communicating accurate and timely health-related information to key decision makers and the general public continues to be a challenge. CATCH works to fill in this gap with advanced technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and computational modeling. CATCH’s new communication approaches aim to translate results from its technologies in a way that garners attention and increases public trust.

A core mission of the CUNY SPH is to shape policy and practice in public health for all, and promote and sustain healthier populations in New York City and around the world. In direct alignment with that mission, the NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center (NYU-CUNY PRC) was established in 2014 to implement, evaluate, and disseminate community-clinical linkage interventions to reduce cardiovascular disease disparities in ethnically diverse communities in NYC. The center emphasizes collaborative research with multi-sector stakeholders and translation of research findings into sustainable and scalable policies and programs.

For more information please visit the NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center website.