Dr. Kari North's research vision at the Gillings School focuses on innovation and collaboration to address health inequities and advance public health globally.
For Kari North, PhD, approaching her new role as the Gillings School’s associate dean for research means going back to the Gillings School’s mission: to improve public health, promote individual well-being, and eliminate health inequities across North Carolina and around the world.
Research is a core component of that mission — and while its research expertise is a key reason that the Gillings School remains the top public school of public health in the country, the School has big plans to raise the bar.
“We’re doing amazing research, and we want to build on that,” said North, who is also professor of epidemiology. One of her top priorities is putting into motion the School’s new strategic research plan, which promotes innovative, collaborative research efforts to ensure positive health outcomes both locally and globally.
North, a renowned researcher herself, knows first-hand the importance of collaboration. She leads the UNC CVD Genetic Epidemiology Computational Laboratory, a collaborative assembly of faculty members, pre- and post-doctoral fellows, and staff members spanning departments across the Carolina campus with collective expertise in both family- and population-based genetic epidemiological research.
“Building collaborative teams to do public health research is the wave of the future — and nobody does this better than Carolina,” she said. “The increasing complexity of public health problems requires a diverse team of individuals to move the needle.”
That’s why the strategic plan is so critical as a research roadmap. More than a year in the making, the plan was spearheaded by Elizabeth French, MA, associate dean for strategic initiatives, and was written by Andy Olshan, PhD, the Barbara Sorenson Hulka Distinguished Professor in Cancer Epidemiology who served as interim associate dean for research from 2022 to 2024, and Alexia Kelley, PhD, assistant dean for research. The plan builds on previous assessments of the School’s research strengths and is based upon several months of intensive discussions among faculty, staff and students, along with a task force representing every department at the Gillings School.
“Building collaborative teams to do public health research is the wave of the future — and nobody does this better than Carolina.”
“This plan focuses more on how we do research than what we do research on,” said Kelley, adding that making the School’s support structures more nimble will enable Gillings to be a leader at the cutting edge of new research approaches as they emerge. “We’re all in this field because we want to make an impact. Our hope is to provide an inclusive and supportive research environment for faculty and students that sets them up to be successful in the science part of the work.”
Olshan noted that the strategic research plan would complement the strategic plan for practice that the Gillings School implemented a couple of years ago, with a special focus on ensuring that the School’s community-based participatory research efforts involve public health researchers and practitioners alike. The plan also considers ways to promote innovation, entrepreneurship and translation of research into policy and action.
“We are a big school full of great people,” he said, “so we are looking for ways to create mechanisms to enhance collaboration across the entire school.”
These mechanisms include building a centralized and searchable database that researchers, students and grantees can use to find others doing similar work — again opening the door to more collaboration. Another collaborative effort is “in-house networking” — holding events where faculty with similar interests can get together, learn about each other’s work and explore opportunities for collaboration.
Some of those networking events are already occurring: One such gathering, held in December, is helping to evolve the School’s approach to mental and behavioral health research. Kelley and Kristen Hassmiller Lich, PhD, associate professor of health policy and management, organized the networking event.
Several faculty members presented brief “flash talks” about their research interests, which included anxiety and depression among HIV-positive patients, violence or neglect in the home, substance use disorder risks, resource optimization modeling, and other issues. The wide variety of mental health topics being studied — and the variety of approaches being used to address those topics — provides a lot of runway to build strength in numbers, Lich noted at the event.
“There is such potential to cross these methods and strengths with other aspects of mental health and behavioral health, and to find opportunities to do more with the deep dives we’ve all already taken,” she said.
Two major factors are driving the School’s approach to its mental and behavioral health research, North said. One is the desire to devote more attention toward community-based interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic sparked the realization that while clinical care is important, so are the interventions that happen in the community — whether it’s through schools, churches or other community organizations.
The other factor is the fact that Gillings School faculty are doing research on both global and local levels — and although sometimes those locations may be far away in terms of distance, their impacts might be more closely tied than one would think.
“The networking event helped bring to light that we need to think about our full umbrella of global to local, and vice versa,” North said. “For example, we’re doing international HIV research that might also have relevance right here in our community. We have all this great global research and local research going on, and they can inform each other and gain perspective from each other.”
In addition to mental and behavioral health, the School’s research office has stimulated a focus on several other urgent and emerging areas:
- Health equity, with the goal of determining how to alleviate the effects of racism and health disparities on health and disease, in N.C. and globally, through both action and research.
- Climate change and air pollution and their impacts on local and global health, and how those impacts are embodied through molecular mechanisms. The hope is to increase the visibility of Gillings research on this escalating global issue.
- The use of Generative AI and other technologies as the foundation for innovative research through collaborations with UNC’s new School of Data Science and Society, with a focus of becoming a leader in the field.
- Making UNC-Chapel Hill a leader in big data science and precision public health by partnering with the schools of medicine, data science, and the College of Arts and Sciences to promote collaborative science that leverages strengths across the entire campus.
The strategic plan calls for establishing an infrastructure that can promote strategic priorities like these while supporting all of the School’s researchers. For example, to keep up with changing federal grantmaking rules, improving research grant processing and compliance through a schoolwide administrative structure would free up researchers to focus more time and energy on their actual research work, not just their paperwork.
North also wants to work closely with new investigators to help them forge a path toward earning their first round of major funding. For mid-level researchers, she envisions a seed-fund program to help get important projects off the ground. “There are a lot of great ideas out there that just need a little funding to get them going,” she said. “It’s really important to me to incentivize and reward our researchers, because they are doing amazing things.”
It’s also important to identify and leverage new funding opportunities to sustain and grow the School’s research programs, North said. Federal research funding levels can be variable year to year, and research institutions like the Gillings School are looking more and more toward private donors, foundations and other nontraditional funding sources for support.
But first, North says, she wants to listen and learn. “I have a big learning curve,” she says. She plans to spend time meeting with faculty, staff, students and department leaders in each of the School’s departments and across campus to build relationships and learn more about their activities, priorities and concerns.
“Overall, my goal is to create an environment for sustained excellence,” North said, “with the core belief that public health has the power to transform our understanding of health and disease — that’s the key to everything we do at Gillings.”
