Newsroom

Structural racism and discrimination (SRD) shapes persistent health disparities by limiting access to care and by directly affecting health and health behaviors. Most research on SRD in the health sector, however, has focused on Black Americans and Latinx. Now, thanks to a new five-year, $4 million grant award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers at the Center for Asian Health, Lewis Katz School of Medicine and Fox Chase Cancer Center have an unprecedented opportunity to expand SRD research to include Asian-Americans.

For more than four decades, Edward C. Rabbitt, MD ’79, has been able to make a difference in people’s lives as an orthopaedic surgeon. Now, he and his wife, Eileen, are making a difference at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine with a generous gift in support of innovation in medical education. The school gave him the opportunity to pursue his passion, and over the years he and Eileen have often spoken about their wish to give back to Temple. Finally, the time was right. 

In scientific research, it’s thrilling to uncover something new, something never documented before. Just as thrilling is to win grant funding to keep that exploration going. Super-competitive, grants and fellowships are difficult to apply for and hard to get. It is always a coup to land one. But there’s something extra special about those first few wins. Just ask Amanda St. Paul and Keman Xu, doctoral candidates in the Biomedical Sciences program at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine. They’re both on cloud nine, celebrating brand-new, highly prestigious fellowship awards for their research.