Completed Work
Research Group Concludes Successful Three-Year NIH Grant
In 2004, the F. Marie Hall Institute for Rural and Community Health was awarded a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to form the West Texas Rural EXPORT Center. (EXPORT stands for Excellence in Partnerships for Community Outreach, Research on Health Disparities, and Training.)
In August 2007, the Institute concluded its three-year NIH EXPORT grant, realizing the goal of building bridges and partnerships across departments, campuses, and institutions in the study of rural West Texas healthcare disparities. EXPORT’s success is evident in the numbers of organizations, investigations, and investigators touched by the project.
During its three years of work, the EXPORT Center provided seed-grant funding for 28 projects over the course of three years with $580,339. EXPORT funded eleven projects over multiple years. Additionally, five projects funded over the entire three-year period were supplemented with local funding. The 50 primary collaborators came from nine departments in seven Health Sciences Center schools across four campuses, thirteen departments in five academic colleges at Texas Tech University, three other state universities and an independent school district. . These projects covered a vast array of health topics relevant to rural West Texas, allowing for a clearer understanding of the nature and extent of health disparities in the region.
ARCH Maps
The F. Marie Hall Institute for Rural and Community Health completed a collaborative venture with the Center for Geospatial Technology in the Department of Economics and Geography at Texas Tech University. Computer-generated imagery generated from statistics spanning the past century were superimposed onto highly detailed maps to show community leaders and policy makers trends in demographics and natural resources for West Texas.