The UVA Precision Health Initiative (PHI) will support transdisciplinary research and training to optimize health outcomes for individuals and entire populations, across a wide range of complex and chronic diseases. While Precision Medicine measures genes and disease factors to help doctors identify unique disease risks and find treatments that will work best for a person, Precision Health adds assessment of environments and lifestyles and identifies treatments or prevention strategies that will work best with the fewest side effects, based on each person’s unique background and conditions. Precision Health for Populations is even broader, including precision medicine, disease prevention, and health promotion for whole communities, outside doctor’s office or hospital settings. Precision Health for Populations collects data that can identify how everyone can protect their own family’s health, and strategies experts can take to promote health and well- being at individual, family, community, state, or national levels. The UVA Precision Health Initiative will conduct research that will engage populations in Virginia to generate new discoveries that could improve the health of all Virginians. The PHI will require expertise from faculty in every school at UVA to conduct impactful, innovative, collaborative, transdisciplinary research. PHI-supported faculty, and the graduate students and postdoctoral scholars they mentor, will address the challenges of acquiring, managing, and studying large scale population-level data on health, and other layers of data that surround people and communities including educational experiences, environmental exposures, personal or family behaviors such as diet, physical activity, sleep, employment, and healthcare access/utilization, and other community characteristics that affect health.

PHI scientists will develop and extend equitable partnerships with communities, policymakers, and stakeholders around Central Virginia to address two initial focus areas, cancer and youth mental health across Virginia. Community-University partnerships focused on addressing health inequities in these areas and others will lay the groundwork required to create cohorts of Virginia residents willing to be followed across their lifespan by contributing multiple “layers” of data from existing and future medical records, and from educational records, community records, and lifestyle and behavioral data. In addition, PHI investigators will develop scalable interventions to understand and address cancer disparities and improve determinants of youth mental health. UVA’s investments in the PHI will advance science and establish UVA’s leadership in statewide Precision Health for Populations. PHI research and training will complement the Paul and Diane Manning Institute for Biotechnology that will establish a state-of-the-art campus to develop innovative cellular, gene, and immuno-therapies. In its first 5 years, the Precision Health Initiative will fund new programs to:

Advance transdisciplinary Pan-University research in precision health for populations by awarding faculty collaborative research grants for researchers representing 3 or more fields.
Train the next generation of precision health for populations scientists and support their development through transdisciplinary mentoring and team science, with mentored grants for graduate and postdoctoral scholars to address diversity, equity, and inclusion in Precision Health for Populations topics.
Develop transformative long-term university-community partnerships supported by grants jointly led by UVA scientists and community leaders to plan for developing cohorts of participating Virginians whose health and behavioral data will lead to knowledge about root causes of disease and poor health, and to develop customized and scalable tools for monitoring these factors and testing novel interventions for them.
Study and intervene on Virginia’s health challenges in two initial focus areas: prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer in vulnerable communities, and understanding and improving youth mental health across Virginia.
Grow UVA’s national profile in Precision Health Research via transdisciplinary programming for university, donor, community, policymaker, and grantor audiences, highlighting the University of Virginia’s leadership and research advances in statewide precision health for populations.

The UVA Precision Health Initiative (PHI) will advance health equity by integrating tools of personalized
medicine with a comprehensive research focus on environments, lifestyles, and community factors across
Virginia. By harnessing data from genetics, environmental exposures, and health behaviors, we will develop
population-focused, data-driven treatments and prevention strategies. PHI researchers will reduce cancer
disparities and improve youth mental health through scalable, community-based interventions that prioritize
health equity. By fostering partnerships with diverse communities and leveraging interdisciplinary research, the UVA PHI will advance science and promote access to precision health for all. In its inaugural year, the PHI has progressed on all of its goals.

• In January, the PHI leadership team established a weekly meeting schedule and held a planning retreat. PHI leaders contribute to university initiatives and events.
• We launched 2 grant programs focusing on Cancer and Youth Mental Health that received 11 applications. The PHI awarded two 3-year Faculty Collaborative grants ($450K). Drs. Li, Cohn, Deval, and Wiseman will establish a Community Cohort in Danville/Martinsville to understand multilevel risk factors and cellular-level outcomes influencing cancer risk with a goal of cancer prevention. Drs. Lyons, Zabek, Bradshaw, Meyers, and Claibourn will test a mental health data dashboard and decision-making protocol to foster tailored decision making for selecting and implementing youth mental health services in schools. The PHI awarded two 1-year Community-University Partnership grants ($25K). Dr.Jacob Resch and interdisciplinary team members Bendall, Bledsoe, Broshek, Pearman, Posas, Thomas, and Thomson will partner with community high schools to test an evidence-based model to manage sports concussions and limit adverse outcomes in athletes. Drs. Sequeira, Henderson-Smith, Mathieu, Teachman, and Barnes, and Region Ten clinicians will create personalized models of risk and resilience among youth with suicidal thoughts/behaviors after a suicide crisis.
• We launched the PHI Seminar Series. Dr. Josh Denny of NIH’s All of Us Project was the inaugural speaker, with excellent cross-grounds attendance, on October 16, 2024. We are recruiting UVA and national experts for subsequent seminars.
• PHI leaders participated in recruiting new faculty including Dr. Matt Gurka, now Chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences, Dr. Chirag Agrawal, faculty in the School of Data Science, and Dr. Timothy Layton, faculty in the Batten School of Public Policy and Leadership, and are contributing to further searches.
• PHI leaders recruited postdoctoral scholars including Jia Ma, working with Dr. Bradshaw, and Hania Taha, working with Dr. Wiseman. We contribute to university-wide Interdisciplinary Postdoc meetings.