About the Midwest Roybal Center

The Midwest Roybal Center for Health Promotion and Translation promotes the adoption and maintenance of healthy behaviors among older adults of ethnic and racial minorities through research-based interventions.

Established in 1998, the Midwest Roybal Center is based in the Center for Research on Health and Aging of the UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy, in partnership with the UIC Department on Disability and Human Development.

Susan L. Hughes, PhD, Professor of Community Health Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for Research on Health and Aging, directed the Midwest Roybal Center from 1998 to 2022.  The Center is currently directed by Principal Investigators Tanvi Bhatt, PhD, Professor of Physical Therapy and Professor of Rehabilitation Services in the College of Applied Health Sciences and David X. Marquez, PhD, Professor of Kinesiology and Nutrition in the College of Applied Health Sciences.  Dr. Marquez is also a Visiting Associate Professor at Rush University's Alzheimer's Disease Center.

The Center develops evidence-based interventions and shares them with organizations and health practitioners that serve older adults, communities, and researchers worldwide. The Center is one of 15 Roybal Centers for Translational Research on Aging funded by the (NIH).

Our current Center that was funded in 2018, supports the design and testing of principle-driven, potent health promotion interventions that have strong promise of progressing through the NIH Stage Change Model. The Center continues to focus on designing interventions for older racial/ethnic minority adults but expands our focus to include cognitive health. The current Center targets four thematic areas of focus to improve cognitive function, namely: physical activity engagement and maintenance; enhancing mobility; harnessing technology to improve intervention scalability and fidelity; and incorporating mechanisms of action that will sustain behavior change. Finally, the current Center incorporates for the first time a Multi-modal ADRD Imaging and Connectomics Core that is enabling investigators to perform brain imaging, interpretation, and storage. The Center also promotes the uniform use across funded pilots of cognitive and physical activity measures from the NIH Toolbox; thereby, enabling the comparison of common outcomes across diverse samples and interventions.

The Midwest Roybal Center nurtures and supports the development of UIC and UIUC researchers studying health promotion and maintenance of older adults by hosting two pilot grant competitions each year — the first dedicated to researchers within UIC and UIUC, the other supports doctoral dissertations from students in the same communities.