About CHAAMPS

UAB and UMN have a multidisciplinary team of investigators and national experts with expertise in diverse fields from public health to cardiovascular disease, cancer control and prevention, surgical oncology, psychosocial motivations, adolescent risk-taking, to community-based participatory research.

Community partners have respected, strong relationships with African American communities. These relationships are essential in developing collaborative strategies to change the current trajectory and explore factors responsible for current differential health outcomes.

African American men’s health research typically focuses on disease risk factors. A comprehensive interventional approach to eliminate the health risk has largely been ignored, until now.

CHAAMPS researchers are investigating the socioeconomic, behavioral and biological factors that drive and sustain the pronounced disparities in African American men, in such areas as unintentional and violence related injuries, cardiovascular disease, prostate and other cancers, diabetes and stroke.

Clinical research on poor health outcomes in African American men often neglects the multiple, complex interplay of socio-environmental, behavioral and bio-physiological influences responsible for differential health outcomes.

By investigating the socioeconomic and environmental factors involved in African American men’s health, CHAAMPS takes a life- course approach, pinpointing critical periods in a person’s life, such as youth/adolescence, young adulthood, middle age and old adulthood, when social context may be more salient in the way it affects physiology or shapes health behavior.

This integrative approach seeks to understand how risk of disease is differentially acquired and manifested and how it can be eliminated.