Leadership
Elbert Huang, MD, MPH, FACP
Professor, University of Chicago
Co-Director Chicago Chronic Condition Equity Network
Elbert Huang is Professor of Medicine, Director of the Center for Chronic Disease Research and Policy, and Associate Director of the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translation Research at the University of Chicago. From 2010 to 2011, he served as a Senior Advisor in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the Department of Health and Human Services. A general internist with over two decades of experience studying clinical and health care policy issues at the intersection of diabetes, aging, and health economics, Dr. Huang’s research focuses on medical decision making for elderly patients with type 2 diabetes. He has also studied cost-effectiveness, including economic analyses of the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Health Disparities Collaboratives initiative for diabetes quality improvement in community health centers. Dr. Huang’s current research interests include interventions to promote self-care by leveraging local community resources.
Elizabeth Lynch, PhD
Associate Professor, Rush University Medical Center
Co-Director Chicago Chronic Condition Equity Network
Elizabeth Lynch is a health equity researcher focused on development and implementation of effective community partnerships to conduct behavioral intervention research to promote health equity across a wide range of health conditions. Dr. Lynch is the Director of the Section of Community Health in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and is co-lead of the Research arm of the RUSH BMO Institute for Health Equity. She is a founder and the Research Director of the Alive Faith Network (AFN), a partnership between African American churches and researchers to address health inequities in African American communities. Dr. Lynch also serves as a Director of the Community Core of the Chicago Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM) to help coordinate and support community-engaged research partnerships and activities within RUSH and across the ITM institutions, including University of Chicago, Loyola and other large Chicago-area healthcare institutions. She has partnered with the AFN as Principal Investigator on six NIH-funded grants to develop and test community-based interventions to improve health equity for African Americans. She has also been PI on two NIH-funded grants to develop and test a community-based intervention to improve diabetes control among African American patients of safety net hospitals. She also partnered with the AFN as PI on two grants to provide COVID-19 testing and vaccinations in community churches and community-based organizations. These projects serve as the basis for numerous other COVID-19 outreach efforts, including evaluation of social determinants of health and resource linkages for community members, and efforts to understand vaccine hesitancy among African Americans and design and implement interventions to improve vaccine uptake in this population. In addition, she is currently PI on two NIH-funded church-based cluster-randomized trials to test interventions to improve blood pressure and physical function among African Americans. These interventions are both conducted in partnership with the AFN and are based on pilot studies conducted within AFN churches.
