The undue burden of obesity, diabetes and hypertension in the Deep South is a focus for the 2021 Marchase Award winner, Andrea Cherrington, M.D. The award celebrates and encourages interdisciplinary work at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

For Cherrington, interdisciplinary not only includes researchers across the schools and departments of UAB, but also envelops the lives and communities of people in rural areas across Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Her latest effort to reduce health disparities and improve chronic disease outcomes — the Deep South Center to Reduce Disparities in Chronic Diseases — is funded by a newly awarded, five-year $21.7 million grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. The grant is led by Cherrington, along with principal investigators Gareth Dutton, Ph.D., Orlando Gutierrez, M.D., and Monica Baskin, Ph.D.

Its goal? Prevent, treat and manage cardiometabolic diseases among racial minorities — primarily Black Americans — and low-income populations who suffer disproportionately from these diseases.

This requires an interdisciplinary approach, as she will explain in her lecture for the 2021 Richard B. Marchase, Ph.D., Interdisciplinary Research Symposium at UAB, which begins Monday, Nov. 1, at 1:30 p.m. The symposium will also feature keynote speaker Rochelle Walensky, M.D., director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a panel discussion led by infectious diseases experts Jeanne Marrazzo, M.D., and Michael Saag, M.D., both professors of medicine in the UAB Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine.

Read More at UAB News.