Mission
CCHRPP’s mission is to expand health department and academic collaborations to address the public health and social justice challenges in persons at risk for or living with HIV infection and related diseases such as hepatitis C and sexually transmitted infections. The populations affected by these diseases share common underlying risk factors such as substance use, mental illness, and suffer from discrimination and social inequities based on factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.
About the work of CCHRPP
Center faculty has a history of working in an interdisciplinary fashion across these diverse populations and risk factors, as do the policies and programs at the AIDS Institute. The Center’s work encompasses not only research that translates directly into policies, programs and practices in the real world at the AIDS Institute and elsewhere, but also formal academic programs and internships that prepare students for careers in these related areas at the New York State Department of Health and elsewhere in state and local governments, the health care system and community-based organizations.
CCHRPP will also establish thought leadership in partnership with the AIDS Institute to guide the completion of the aggressive and groundbreaking efforts to “end the epidemics” of HIV and hepatitis C in New York.
The SUNY-AIDS Institute collaboration is unique because of its focus across related diseases, risk factors and populations and because of its foundation on the comprehensive, real-world policy and programmatic approaches built by the AIDS Institute and the Center’s cross-disciplinary collaborators. This work will inform not only these efforts in New York, but in the nation as a whole, where the federal government has recently committed to similar goals for ending the HIV epidemic, and internationally. It will also have implications for emerging public health issues such as the opioid epidemic where many of the same policy and programmatic approaches are likely to be applicable.
While the CCHRPP is formally located at the University at Albany College of Integrated Health Sciences, it leverages its close partners at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and actively engages other collaborators aligned with its mission.