UNC receives $4.6 million CDC preparedness center award
| September 22, 2010 | |
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health received a $4.6 million award from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to establish a Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center.
Under the five-year cooperative agreement, the center will meet the training needs of workers involved with public health preparedness and response in four states – North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
Dr. Pia MacDonald
Pia MacDonald, PhD, research associate professor of epidemiology and director of the UNC Center for Public Health Preparedness, is the project’s principal investigator. The Center is part of the North Carolina Institute for Public Health, the service arm of UNC’s public health school. “We are excited about continuing to work in partnership with local, regional and state public health partners,” MacDonald said. “We have established wonderful collaborative projects and programs with our partners in the past nine years and look forward to expanding our efforts around training with the new public health preparedness and response core competencies soon to be issued by CDC.”
The emergency response learning center will target mid-tier public health professionals at local, regional and state public health agencies in the four states. Its personnel will collaborate with partners in each state to develop training and educational opportunities around the public health preparedness and response core competencies being developed by the CDC and the Association of Schools of Public Health. The center also will develop partner-requested education and training.
The learning center builds on the public health preparedness training and curriculum development established at the UNC Center for Public Health Preparedness, including pandemic influenza planning, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, emergency law, public health surveillance, mental health preparedness and applied epidemiology.
UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, 919-966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.
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