Addressing Health Equity Goal of New CHERI Director

By Ellen Goldbaum

Heather M. Gardiner, PhD, is well aware that the traditional path most academic researchers take doesn’t exactly emphasize community engagement.

“When you do the dissertation, you do it all on your own and that’s how most of us are trained,” she says. “We are told, ‘This is how you do science.’” Researchers may go into the community to recruit and to study, but she says there’s usually little to no mention of how and why researchers should consider partnering with the community.

“Most of us don’t get that training in doctoral programs,” she says.

Gardiner has spent much of her academic career working to try and change that by helping researchers and students appreciate how important and valuable it is to actively engage the community in their work. “The advantage of doing community-engaged research is that it’s much more impactful and relevant,” she says.

Now Gardiner is bringing that expertise to UB. This past summer, she was named director of the Community Health Equity Research Institute (CHERI) and professor and inaugural Carl V. Granger Endowed Chair in Health Equity in the Department of Family Medicine in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Granger, who passed away in 2019, was a pioneering African American physician, professor emeritus of rehabilitation medicine at UB and a generous supporter of research focused on health equity.

Calling Gardiner’s return to Western New York “a true homecoming” — Gardiner earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in communication from UB — Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, UB's vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School, notes that Gardiner has led or co-led numerous federally funded projects, securing over $25 million in external funding. She has published more than 60 scientific articles.

Relying on both qualitative and quantitative research methods, Gardiner conducts community-engaged research in interpersonal health communication, chronic kidney disease, and organ donation and transplantation — all of it geared toward advancing health equity.

In addition to her three UB degrees, she also earned a master’s in social and behavioral health from Virginia Commonwealth University. Most recently, she was a tenured professor at Temple University’s College of Public Health, where she directed the Health Disparities Research Lab and was founding director of the Office of Community Engaged Research and Practice.

“Part of what attracted me back to UB was that it’s the university, not just one school, that is committed to the Community Health Equity Research Institute,” says Gardiner. “I love that President Tripathi was part of the institute’s origin story and is in full support of what we do here. I was really impressed by all the great work that’s being done and the decision to make a commitment to health equity a defining feature of UB.”

In her new role, Gardiner will expand CHERI’s research impact and strengthen partnerships with the community with the goal of innovating new ways to address health disparities.

She has been working with the institute’s executive board as it develops an online training module for faculty, staff and students conducting community-engaged research in any field.

One of the first teams to take that training will be investigators involved with the $3.6 million grant “Igniting Hope in Buffalo, New York Communities: Training the Next Generation of Health Equity Researchers.” The focus of the grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health is to train early-career faculty to address health inequities in Western New York.

Gardiner is also meeting with research teams throughout the university to provide guidance on how they can best engage with the community. Next semester, she plans to convene a special interest group so that people doing community-engaged research throughout the university can meet regularly to share ideas and inspire collaborations. 

Gardiner will also continue work on her two R01 grants, both of which deal with improving outcomes in people with end stage kidney disease. One of them deals with improving how transplant providers, often the nephrologist, talk to patients about live donor kidney transplants. The goal is to find out how improved communication can increase equity in live donor kidney transplantation.

Her other R01 supports development of a decisional support tool related to genetic testing for people considering becoming live kidney donors. It was recently discovered that in some people, end stage kidney disease has a genetic component, which has repercussions not only for the patient and family members, but also for people who are considering donating a kidney. The tool will help people understand the ethical issues related to this discovery and what it means for live kidney donor transplants.

Gardiner’s work in organ donation originated during her time as a UB student working on her doctoral dissertation with Tom Feeley, PhD, professor in the Department of Communication, on college students’ attitudes toward organ donation. As her work evolved, Gardiner also developed a strong collaboration with Liise K. Kayler, MD, program director, kidney and pancreas transplantation; chief of the Division of Transplant Surgery, and chief of transplant surgery at Erie County Medical Center, who conducts community-engaged research developing educational tools aimed at increasing kidney transplant access. 

In addition to engaging the community in traditional academic research, Gardiner emphasizes the importance of the university establishing a strong, consistent presence in the community

“I’m hoping that we can create community engagement hubs in neighborhoods,” she says. The goal of those hubs would be to educate the community about research and science in general, creating strong, resilient partnerships between the university and the community.

“I’d love to be a part of a culture here where there’s appreciation for past disservices and injustices, and a true motivation to do things better so that we work with the community in an authentic way that creates and maintains trust,” she says.