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Centre for Urban Health Initiatives
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Bringing together researchers, policy makers and the community to support urban health research development.

The Centre for Urban Health Initiatives (CUHI) was one of seven research centres established in 2004 by the CIHR’s Institute of Population and Public Health under its Centres for Research Development program.  Located in University College with Principal Investigator John Myles, Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in the Social Foundations of Public Policy, CUHI has provided infrastructure and platforms for the stimulus of inter-disciplinary research, training and knowledge exchange on the social and physical determinants of health.  Scholarship within the centre focused on emerging areas of  population and public health, including neighbourhoods, food security & urban agriculture, physical environments, youth sexual health, chronic disease prevention & management, environmental health justice and policy pathways for equitable health and health care.  The Board was chaired by Professor Dennis Magill and centre operations were managed by the Director of Research (Brenda Ross) with the assistance of the Centre Coordinator(s) (Stacey Creak and prior to that Alexis Kane-Speer). 

Due to discontinuation of the Centres for Research Development program, the Centre will be closing on April 15, 2011.  CUHI has had certainly had a good run.  Throughout our centres operations, CUHI has been proud to work with a diverse set of policy and community partners and to provide supports to researchers across a wide variety of disciplines.  Over the years, we have attracted 108 academic researchers across 25 disciplines and 20 institutions.  A total of 116 research projects received CUHI supports and these have led to numerous spin-off projects, proposal submissions, successful major grants and publications.  In addition, CUHI provided training supports and opportunities for at least 126 graduate students and 119 undergraduates, one post-doctoral fellow and 29 other doctoral students.  Many of the centres’ platforms served as spaces for interdisciplinary researcher and stakeholder dialogues.  Knowledge exchange activities have been extensive and involved impressive numbers of community and policy stakeholder users of research across diverse settings as well as faculty and students from a variety of disciplines.  Our summative evaluation report can be viewed here.  Most of our activities can be viewed on our website with additional information archived at the University of Toronto

It has been a great seven years and we are thankful for the opportunity to get to know and work with all of you.  We are proud of the results we produced and thankful for all your efforts.  We would like to encourage all of you to continue to your interdisciplinary collaborations and wish you all great success in the future!


John Myles
Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in the Social Foundations of Public Policy

Brenda Ross
Director of Research/Senior Research Associate


Dennis Magill
Chair of Advisory Board



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