Twenty years ago, Minnesota consistently ranked as one of the healthiest states in the country. However, that ranking obscured a stark reality: not every community in the state was sharing in that wellbeing. The University of Minnesota Medical School established the Program in Health Disparities Research (PHDR) to close that gap. Over two decades, PHDR has done something even bigger in redefining how the University itself approaches rigorous, fundable research.
Dr. Kolawole Okuyemi founded and led PHDR before transitioning leadership to Dr. Michele Allen in 2016, around the same time Dr. James Pacala became chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. The Medical School invested in PHDR's founding, and Family Medicine has remained its key long-term supporter, though the program's benefits have reached far beyond any single department.
"The start of PHDR was not spontaneous," says Dr. Kolawole Okuyemi, PHDR's founding director. Dr. Deborah Powell, then dean of the Medical School, initiated the program deliberately. “We had this excellent medical school, but there were communities that weren't benefiting."
This investment and commitment from leadership set PHDR on a rapid, stable trajectory. Dr. James Pacala, outgoing chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, describes this expansion as steady, compounding momentum. "The impact and the recognition begins to grow incrementally throughout the course of the program," he says. "It's something that occurs every day."
Setting a new research model
From day one, PHDR was built to be bigger than any single person. Early pilot programs connected faculty with each other and local communities, laying the groundwork to secure major federal funding from multiple Institutes across the NIH.
Two early center grants set the model: One grew into the Minnesota Center for Cancer Collaboration, building partnerships across the state with Somali, Hmong, and Latino communities around cancer disparities. Another, a Center for Health Equity grant, partnered with a network of African American churches on a body and soul program building health promotion around fruit and vegetable consumption and physical activity. These large awards laid the groundwork for PHDR’s current center grant, C2DREAM.
What made these programs matter institutionally wasn't just that they worked. It's that they earned the University's attention in terms it already respected. "The coin of the realm in academic medicine is still prestigious research awards and grants," Pacala says. Community-engaged research proved it could compete and win on that same footing.
Mainstream research
Two decades ago, community-engaged research carried minimal institutional weight. It lacked reliable publication in top journals, wasn't clearly fundable at scale, and had no defined path through promotion and tenure. PHDR shifted this paradigm by demonstrating that community-engaged health disparities research belonged in the same conversation as any other field of academic medicine.
"The Program in Health Disparities Research was a pioneer in showing that community engaged research is science that belongs in the mainstream," Okuyemi says. Before PHDR, work like this rarely led to publications, at most an interview or a write-up. "Now, you can publish this work in very good journals. You can write grants that get funded. And these aren't small grants." The program proved that such work secures major grants and top-tier publications, ultimately embedding team-based, community-engaged criteria into the University's promotion and tenure guidelines.
Promotion and tenure criteria across the institution now explicitly recognize team-based, community-engaged research. "Now it's just part of the default," Pacala says.
Building cross-disciplinary research
One of PHDR's most consequential early decisions was recognizing that health disparities research is inherently multidisciplinary. PHDR opened its pilot grants to faculty across public health, nursing, dentistry, and pharmacy. Being intentional and selective in hiring, and bringing in the right people early, laid the foundation for that reach to hold.
That choice is a large part of why PHDR now functions as connective tissue across the health sciences rather than a single department's initiative. "This started as a small office in the medical school," Okuyemi says. "Right now it's grown across all the health sciences, and it's almost seamless. People walk together regardless of which school they're in. That's probably the biggest impact PHDR has had over the last 20 years, and it's one of the biggest institutions of its kind."
The ripple effects reach beyond the University. The Department of Family Medicine and Community Health leads nationally in NIH funding, with PHDR a key part of driving success.When the University's Clinical and Translational Science Institute needed community-engaged research infrastructure to remain competitive for its own funding, PHDR was already there. "That validates the importance of the work," Pacala says, "and what it brings to the overall research machine."
Community-built trust
Beyond funding, PHDR prioritized rebuilding trust between the university and local populations. Historically, research relationships often ended the moment a grant did, leaving communities with little beyond a published paper. PHDR was built around a different premise, one that treated community partnership as infrastructure to sustain, not a resource to draw down.
The Department now describes its research identity more broadly with this approach of partnering with community "all the way from conception, based on what they think their needs are, all the way through the conduct of the work, publication, and dissemination," as Pacala puts it. Twenty years on, those partnerships are one of PHDR's most durable assets, and a model other programs across the University now look to.
Looking ahead
Perhaps the clearest sign of PHDR's institutional impact is what happened after its founding leadership moved on. When Okuyemi transitioned the program to Dr. Michele Allen in 2016, growth didn't slow. It continued under her leadership, extending the reach PHDR had already built across the health sciences. “It's grown into something bigger than my biggest dreams," Okuyemi says. Early on, a natural question loomed over any program built around a founding vision: Would that support hold once new leadership arrived? At PHDR, the answer was an emphatic yes. The program had simply become too valuable, and too visible a source of institutional pride, to do anything but invest.
That durability was reinforced by an endowed chair in health disparities research, the first of its kind in the country, which gave the program funding independent of any single grant cycle. "I'm more than thrilled that PHDR, in 20 years, has become the household institution, the enduring program at the University that everyone wants to work with," Okuyemi says. Public health, CTSI, and departments across the University now count PHDR as a partner of choice. "The pride of a leader is to see a program outlive them."
Twenty years in, PHDR sits at the center of a much larger vision. Pacala, handing off the department's leadership, sees the next chapter as one of expansion rather than maintenance. "We are deservedly the leader of this activity, but we really need to broaden it out," he says, pointing to statewide clinical trial networks and ongoing work in greater Minnesota and Indigenous communities as the next frontier for PHDR's approach.
Two decades ago, this kind of research had to prove it belonged. Today, it shapes how the university trains researchers, evaluates scholarship, and builds partnerships across the state. That is what institutional impact looks like: not a single milestone, but a foundation strong enough to keep building on.