The Center for Research on Women with Disabilities is located near Baylor College of Medicine and its affiliated institutions and The University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston School of Public Health in the Texas Medical Center. Baylor College of Medicine Information Technology and Computing Resource Center collaborate with Rice University and the Texas Medical Center Technology Planning Committee to provide a seamless interface between the Baylor Enterprise system and the National Information Infrastructure.
Computer Resource Center and the National Information Infrastructure Extensive data banks of research information, educational, and vocational learning modules are available through the network of web sites linking colleges, universities, and research centers all over the world. The Internet is one component of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) that was originally created by the federal government and sponsored through the National Science Foundation. The government spends millions of dollars to promote the extension of the NII for educational and research purposes through grants from the Department of Commerce, National Telecommunication Information Administration (NTIA). Houston is the site of a National Science Foundation NII hub, SESQUINET, housed at Rice University. Baylor College of Medicine has shown itself to be a leader in the establishment of a four star award winning home page, which forms the electronic user interface connecting text or video Internet conferencing, telemedicine at the DeBakey Heart Center, and linkage to many resources at the Texas Medical Center, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center / Health Science Center and Rice University with extensive national / international links. The BCM site receives an average of 5,000 hits per day, with an average visitor rate of more than 400 per month for departmental home pages. The NII has been found to be an effective medium for the dissemination of disability related educational materials at numerous institutions including the University of Texas Health Science Center HIV/AID Information Link (HAIL), Independent Living Research Utilization (ILRU) program and University of Alabama, Spain Rehabilitation Center. (http://www.neosoft.com/hail/; http://www.bcm.tmc.edu/ilru; http://www.sci.rehabm.uab.edu/; also see http;//utsph.sph.edu/)
The Baylor College of Medicine Enterprise Services, the Information Technology Program, and departmental local area networks consist of 100 UNIX servers and Sun Workstations, over 200 Xterminals, 250 printers, and about 500 PCs and Macintosh computers serving a client base of 4000 users. An Auspex NetServer 7000 / 600 as the Enterprise Wide Resource Server for world wide web. The server is a high performance corporate UNIX NFS server that functions as a tera byte (1,000,000 MB) data storage unit for the main Baylor College of Medicine web site (http://www.bcm.tmc.edu/ ). The Center for Research on Women with Disabilities has a home page with 15 fact sheets that contains Anonymous FTP service for large research manuscripts and databases ( http://www.bcm.tmc.edu/crowd/ ). The Baylor Computing Resource Center serves to facilitate the use of information technology through educational courses, consultation, computing facilities, and software library.
BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE and its Affiliated Institutions
The Center for Research on Women with Disabilities is located near Baylor College of Medicine and its affiliated institutions and The University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston School of Public Health in the Texas Medical Center.
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER AT HOUSTON (UTHSC-H) and its Components
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHSC-H) is a component of The University of Texas System and is the most comprehensive of the six health institutions in the system. It was established in 1972 within the Texas Medical Center to coordinate and administer the activities of several health education units in Houston.
The Medical School of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
The primary objective of the Medical School is the education of physicians for the practice of medicine. The nine-story Medical School building is connected to the Freeman Building and bridges Ross Sterling Avenue to form one continuous structure with the Hermann Hospital and its major additions, the Cullen, Jones and Robertson Pavilions. Tunnels provide links with the Hermann Professional Building and its garages as well as with the Shriners Hospital. The building contains offices, teaching and research laboratories, classrooms, lecture halls, study areas, animal facilities, educational and biomedical communications support areas, student lounges, a recreation center and administrative suites.
The School of Public Health of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
The School of Public Health is a unit of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHSC-H) located at the Texas Medical Center. Other educational units of the Health Science Center are the Medical School, the Dental Branch, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the School of Nursing, and the School of Allied Health Sciences. Established in 1967, the SPH is the only school of public health in the state. It is one of 28 graduate schools of public health in the U.S. accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health and is generally regarded to be unique in its multidisciplinary, matrix organization and structure.
The Center for Health Promotion Research and Development.
One specialized Center at the School of Public Health is The Center for Health Promotion Research and Development (CHPRD) conducts research on smoking, alcohol and drug misuse, nutrition, safety and injury control, violence prevention, AIDS education, health screening, stress management, and self-management of chronic conditions. Surveys of local, state and national populations, agencies and professional associations, evaluations of programs, and health policy analyses provide the research base for the research and teaching programs of the CHPRD.
From an initial budget of $250,000 provided by the UTHSC-H in 1981, the CHPRD core budget has been added as a separate line item in the State budget. Current state fiscal year funding is $460,703 with contract and grant awards totaling $3,513,649. Since 1982, CHPRD professional and support staff has grown from a core of seven to its level of over 100, and project offices have been established at UT/Austin (1984), UTHSC/San Antonio (1985) and UT/El Paso (1994). The CHPRD has 18 investigators including the disciplines of health education and social psychology, community psychology, sociology, epidemiology, and psychometrics.
The CHPRD Houston office includes 28 offices, 2 conference rooms and two central core areas with 37 additional partitioned work spaces. The Houston office houses over 60 personal computers. Statistics, database, and presentation preparation software as well as desktop publishing capabilities in both MS-DOS and Macintosh formats are available within the Center.
Nineteen grants and contracts are currently awarded to the CHPRD by the following funding agencies: the National Cancer Institute, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the National Center for Research Resources, the Houston Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, and the Ryan White Planning Council. the CHPRD postdoctoral and predoctoral training program began in 1984 and is currently funded under a grant from NCI which supports seven fellowship positions.
Teaching programs of the CHPRD are conducted in the School of Public Health at Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso, and in collaboration with other University of Texas schools, including the Medical Schools at Houston, Galveston and San Antonio, and Schools of Allied Health Sciences at Houston and Galveston, and various departments at UT-Austin. Since Fall 1989-90, the School of Public Health has trained M.P.H., Dr.P.H., and Ph.D. students who wish to specialize in health promotion/health education. The faculty for this teaching program is drawn primarily from the CHPRD and Behavioral Sciences Discipline within the SPH, but members of each of the other disciplines also are included.
In 1986, the CHPRD was designated a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion Research and Development. Research collaborative programs and training are continual with several countries and international groups.
Research grants and contracts have extended the activities of the CHPRD to the Mexican-American border communities with large-scale programs to reduce risk factors for the leading causes of death in the region; to school and worksites in several parts of Texas to develop and evaluate child and employee health promotion programs; and to hospitals and rural physicians' offices to assess their efforts to help patients modify smoking, dietary, and other health practices.
Director of the CHPRD is Guy Parcel, Ph.D., Co-Director of the SWCPR. CHPRD faculty and staff members participate in the SWCPR.
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