The University of Illinois at Chicago

Program Director/Principal Investigator (Last, First, Middle):

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Facilities and Other Resources

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO

A land-grant institution chartered in 1867, The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is a member in good standing of the Association of American Universities and is fully accredited by the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. UIC, the largest university in the Chicago area, has over 27,000students, 15 colleges — including the nation's largest medical school — and annual research expenditures of approximately $347 million. UIC operates the state's major public medical center and serves as the principal educator of Illinois' physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses and other health-care professionals.

UIC is one of the top 50 research-funded institutions in the nation.With over 2000 instructional faculty members, there is one faculty member to every 11 students, which allows for a more personal learning experience. Approximately 76 percent of tenured faculty members teach undergraduate courses and 81 percent of full-time instructional faculty have earned a PhD or equivalent.UIC's student body is recognized as one of the nation's most diverse. UIC’s fall 2014 undergraduate enrollment was 26.4% Hispanic, 23.1% Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander, 7.9% Black, 35.8% White, 9.3% International, and 4.3% Other/Unknown.Since 1989, UIC has doubled our African American, Latino, and Native American tenured and tenure-track faculty and fourteen percent of faculty are Asian American/Pacific Islander.Based upon its full time undergraduate enrollment it is designated as a Minority Serving Institution (MSI), and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI).UIC is also eligible under Title V of the Higher Education Act to apply for funding set aside for Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) per the U.S. Department of Education. UIC will officially become a Hispanic Serving institution at the time it receives funding under a Title V award. Currently, several UIC colleges have applications in development or being reviewed by multiple federal sponsors including DoD, HRSA, USDA, and the DoED.

University Support and Resources

University Library

The University Library provides collections and services in support of campus instructional and research programs at the following locations:the Richard J. Daley Library, the Library of the Health Sciences and the Science Library.The total holdings of the libraries include a collection of more than 2.2 million volumes, 30,000 current journal titles and 3.9 million other items, including microfilms, manuscripts and cartographic documents.

The Library of the Health Sciences (LHS) supports teaching,research, service and clinical programs in the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Applied Health Sciences, andPharmacy, the School of Public Health, and the UIC Hospital and Clinics. With the central library in Chicago and three regionalsites in Peoria, Rockford and Urbana, LHS is in a unique position to understand and provide for the information needs of students and faculty, ofusers on and off campus, and of urban and rural healthprofessionals. LHS is the largest library devoted to health sciences in the Midwest and is one of the largest health sciences libraries in thecountry. The library has a total collection of 725,000volumes andreceives over 5,200and electronic journal titles in the health sciences field. LHS also serves as theRegional Medical Library for ten Midwestern states under a contract awarded by theNational Library of Medicine.

University Computing Resources

The Academic Computing and Communications Center (ACCC) supports the educational and research needs of the UIC community by providing a variety of computing, networking and telecommunication services. ACCC runs the campus network and the telephone system and offers a number of services, including Internet access, public computer labs, electronic mail, computer consulting, instructional technology support, teaching and learning servers, Web publishing, site-licensed software, microcomputer repair, LAN support, supercomputing support, network security and videoconferencing services.

The ACCC provides the following services for use by all UIC faculty, students and staff without charge:

• Public personal computer labs and instructional facilities, including both PCs and Macs in the labs, all connected to the ADNii network and to the ACCC’s local area network;
• Instructional support/consulting: free courses on computer topics and free general consulting on issues related to the ACCC systems, the ADNii network, microcomputing and electronic mail. In addition, instructional support is provided to faculty who wish to integrate computers and computing into their courses.

The School of Public Health

The University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health (SPH) was established in 1970 and is accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health. UIC SPH is the only fully accredited school of public health in the state of Illinois. UIC SPH has as its mission the enhancement of quality of life through improving the public’s health and serves as a critical link in the education of the nation’s public health workforce. The UIC SPH is particularly recognized for its strong programs inprevention research (including violence prevention and drug prevention outreach programs), health promotion, maternal and child health, gerontology, environmental and occupational safety and health, infectious diseases, cancer, asthma, biostatistical methods (including random effects modeling, longitudinal data analysis and linear models), public health informatics, public health policy, and public health practice and leadership.

School of Public Health Facilities

Three buildings provide modern, well-furnished, well-equipped teaching, research, conference, interview and study facilities for faculty, students, staff and community groups and organizations.

The Office of the Dean and the school’s administration, the Community Health Sciences Division, the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Division, and the Health Policy and Administration Division are housed in the School of Public Health building located at 1603 West Taylor Street. The 1603 West Taylor (School of Public Health and Psychiatric Institute, or SPHPI) building provides 127,000 square feet and offers an auditorium, a multi-purpose activity room for special events, a parenting room, interview rooms, the Paul Q. Peterson Study Center, the Alan W. Donaldson Student Lounge and a cafe.

The Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Division faculty, classrooms and laboratories are housed in the School of Public Health building at 2121 West Taylor Street (School of Public Health-West or SPHW) which includes approximately 80,000 square feet. The division has 10,500 square feet of laboratory space for teaching and research. Laboratory capabilities include biochemical and cellular analyses; gas and liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry; particle and aerosol analyses; particulate, chemical and noise measurement; weather and air pollution monitoring, and water quality and trace metal analysis. The division’s computer laboratory allows access to extensive university resources via the UIC mainframe.

The Institute for Health Research and Policy, located at 1747 West Roosevelt Road, provides 36,500 square feet for research, teaching, conference and focus group facilities.

SPH Computer Resources

All faculty and staff in SPH are provided with desktop or laptop computers which are connected to the Internet but protected via firewalls and intrusion detection software. In addition, faculty have access to secure storage within the College through a firewalled local area networks. Once students have UIC identification cards and their unique computer accounts, they have access to the SPH computer labs, located in the two School of Public Health buildings, as well as to the Academic Computing and Communications Center computer labs across the campus. The auditorium and major conference rooms are equipped for teleconferencing.

Data Security

All computing facilities for faculty and staff in SPH are provided through an authenticated virtual local area network which requires authentication via the campus unified identity management system, which is based on Microsoft Active Directory. This infrastructure provides for integrated network administration and information security. Appropriate access is granted to individuals to access, stored, and modify data on systems administered by the School and the University. Each desktop and laptop has a set of standard software that provides users with effective productivity and security tools. Fileservers and data stores that faculty and staff use to store and share information are secured in a secure server room with backup and disaster recovery policies and procedures in place.

SPH practices for data collection, storage, transmission and sharing of High Risk data include:

• Data Collection: Capture of high-risk and secure data, via an electronic survey, must be done through either REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) or Qualtrics. Both are HIPPA-compliant web-based applications for building and managing online collections of sensitive and high-risk data.
• Data Storage: High-risk and sensitive data must be on either a University, SPH provided, or authorized cloud-based secured server. All approved cloud-based solutions must be HIPPA-compliant and must have an executed BAA with the University. If the data is to be used on a local computing device, the device must be encrypted with either the native facility of the applicable operating system (such as BitLocker on Windows or FileVault 2 on OSX) or with PGP Whole Disk Encryption.
• Data Transmission: All sensitive and high-risk data must be transmitted via an encrypted protocol such as https or SFTP. An intercampus secure e-mail solution is available through the Protected E-Mail Attachment Repository (PEAR) system; however there is no available secure campus email solution for message outside of UIC.
• Data Sharing: the practice for sharing high-risk and sensitive data within SPH is to store data on a secured server either in the School or in the University’s central computing facilities. An SFTP server is available to share files with individuals outside of the UIC community.

Divisions of the School of Public Health

The School of Public Health is organized into four academic divisions and a number of specialized research, service and training centers and programs.

Community Health Sciences Division (CHS)

The Community Health Sciences Division focuses on public health practice aspects of community health as they relate to the interaction of individuals, families and community structures. The behavioral sciences form the theoretical basis for community applications to enhance health and well-being.

CHS offers three tracks in which students can focus their studies: behavioral sciences and health promotion, gerontology, or maternal and child health (including MCH epidemiology), or students may develop an individualized program. Students may combine track courses with other CHS topic areas such as developmental disabilities, global health, public health practice, public health nutrition and women’s health studies.

The following program is housed in the CHS Division:

Maternal and Child Health Center for Excellence

The goal of the Maternal and Child Health Center of Excellence is to provide graduate leadership education for individuals pursuing careers in maternal and child health. It is a comprehensive, competency-based program focusing on the health needs of women, children and families and on the services designed to meet these needs. The MCH Center of Excellence is one of twelve such programs funded at schools of public health in the United States through the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau.

The MidAmerica Center for Public Health Practice (MCPHP)

The mission of the MidAmerica Center for Public Health Practice is to build individual and organizational capacity to improve health by:

• Working with partners to creatively address public health practice issues;
• Translating public health research into practical resources; and
• Providing professional development, planning, and evaluation services.

The MCPHP has collaborated with local, regional, and national partners to improve population health through public health workforce development. MCPHP offers a continuum of consulting services and technical assistance for practice organizations. The Center links workforce development initiatives to the strategic needs of partner organizations, often related to state and national priorities and issues. MCPHP brings together a combination of practice expertise and support to provide customized solutions to address current challenges in public health practice as well as to sustain, and complete complicated initiatives.

MCPHP also promotes academic-practice partnerships to improve the performance of the public health system. By linking research to real-world practice, its goal is to improve the quality of education for master’s and doctoral students, and to explore and identify best practices for public health organizations.

MCPHP offers professional training and education services that address a broad range of topics and issues, in areas such as organizational and community capacity, management, leadership, and preparedness. The services are tailored to meet the needs of public health practitioners in both rural and urban areas in the Midwest. Training activities include face-to-face, online, and blended learning options. MCPHP is able to apply technology to develop distance and blended learning solutions to deliver online trainings in a variety of formats. MCPHP also has the experience and tools needed to plan and execute meetings and conferences for the public health workforce around a multitude of topics.

MCPHP focuses on three main areas of service – Training, Technical Assistance/Planning (TA/Planning), and Evaluation. The following provides examples of projects that use/used these services:

Training. MCPHP houses the coordinating office for the six-state Region V Public Health Training Collaborative, which will develop regional training programs and work together on state-specific training. The Collaborative is an unprecedented partnership to establish and implement a unified strategic approach to improving the workforce development infrastructure of the entire region. Each of the HRSA-funded Public Health Training Centers (PHTCs) have unique expertise, resources, and partnerships that together form a strong foundation for public health workforce development and capacity building. The Collaborative will address a shared regional theme of capacity building for population health improvement. The Region V Collaborative includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. This is one of 10 regional projects funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

The Illinois Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center (IPERLC) is also part of MCPHP. This Center addresses the preparedness training needs of the public health workforce in the State of Illinois, to enhance their capacity and performance to prepare for and respond to man-made and natural disasters. IPERLC works closely with its partners to assess, develop, deliver, evaluate and recognize the attainment of continued competency-based training and education. This Center is one of 14 funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

TA/Planning. We Choose Healthwas an Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) initiative created to encourage and support the implementation of community health programs that addressed: Healthy Eating and Active Living; Smoke-Free Living; Healthy and Safe Built Environments. We Choose Health awarded 21 grantees covering 60 counties and impacting almost 3 million people in Illinois. MCPHP provided technical assistance, planning and support services to develop, coordinate, and implement the program for IDPH. This included developing the process for soliciting and selecting the grantees, communicating with and providing guidance to the grantees through the process, gathering information on their progress and outcomes, and preparing a final report - a Best Practice Guide, which outlining the impactful programs that were implemented across the State.

MCPHP is also assisting IDPH in the development of their State Health Improvement Plan (SHIP). This is a legislatively mandated document focusing on health priorities and strategies for improvement that the state of Illinois must produce every four years, in order to maintain its accreditation as a state public health agency. The SHIP is informed by an assessment of the state’s current health condition, called the State Health Assessment (SHA). MCPHP is coordinating and working with the SHIP Planning Council, which serves as the body that guides the interpretation of Illinois’ State Health Assessment and the development of the State Health Improvement Plan.

Evaluation. In support of the Illinois Chapter of the March of Dimes (MOD), MCPHP was asked to conduct a formal statewide evaluation of the Becoming a Mom/Comenzando Bien prenatal education program. Activities included training on and facilitating data collection with the grantee sites; maintaining the database; reporting process/outcome data; provide ongoing evaluation input and feedback to MOD project staff related to program recruitment, retention, process and outcome measures, as well as reports to the State Program Services Committee.