About Us

Our Approach

We strategically select the health issues that carry the greatest burden and hold the greatest promise for amelioration. Among the topics that CMIPS is addressing are novel study designs to identify effective intervention strategies in resource-constrained settings. We use stepped wedge and learn as you go research designs, two-stage designs and quasi-experimental designs that utilize and integrate existing stores of previously untapped data. This “big data” includes electronic medical records, surveillance systems and population surveys, which can be deployed to obtain timely answers to key public health policy and health care questions.

Our Expertise

CMIPS faculty and staff include experts in causal inference, survival data analysis, longitudinal analysis, computing and optimization, measurement error, high-dimensional data reduction, network science, epidemiologic methods, health economics and qualitative and mixed methods. CMIPS’ goal is to become a leading global center for translating research findings into real-word applications that improve public health in diverse settings.

Why Implementation and Prevention Science

Only 14% of biomedical research is ever translated into practice, and among these, fully 17 years passes, on average, between the time of submission of the research article and eventual implementation. For example, cervical cancer is now uncommon in North America and Western Europe, but is the first or second leading cause of cancer mortality among women in low and middle income countries. Similar patterns exist for maternal and under 5 child mortality, and HIV/AIDS. Fully half of colorectal cancer mortality is preventable by following standard screening guidelines, yet, even in the US, coverage lags. The underlying causes of the rapidly growing cardiometabolic disease epidemic are well-known, but wide-scale application of effective preventive interventions lags far behind.

Set of 9 voluntary global NCD targets for 2025 from World Health Organization