Professor Emerita, Health Behavior & Health Equity
Barbara Israel is the Founding Director of the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center, funded initially in 1995 through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Center is a collaborative partnership involving members of community-based organizations, health and human service agencies, and academia that fosters and supports CBPR research, intervention and policy change projects aimed at increasing knowledge and addressing factors associated with health inequities and quality of life in Detroit, Michigan. She has published widely in the areas of community-based participatory research (CBPR), community empowerment, evaluation, stress and health, social networks, and health inequities. Dr. Israel has extensive experience conducting community-based participatory research in collaboration with partners in diverse ethnic communities.
Dr. Israel has been involved in several of these CBPR efforts focusing on: an examination of the social and physical environmental determinants of childhood asthma and intervention strategies aimed at reducing these determinants; the relationship between psychosocial and physical environmental and biological factors and cardiovascular disease and strategies for addressing these factors (e.g., interventions aimed at increasing access to healthy foods and physical activity spaces); and building capacity for and engaging in policy change aimed at eliminating health inequities. Given her Emerita status, she is not engaging in new CBPR projects but is available to assist others in making connections for such efforts.
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Research Areas: Community-Based Participatory Research, Evaluation/Participatory Evaluation, Social Networks, Health Disparities,