MCW Comprehensive Injury Center - Division of Injury Science

The Division of Injury Science's Seed Project Funding Program funds three projects for $25,000 each year focused on reducing injury disparities. The purpose of the Seed Projects is to provide data or supporting information to facilitate a federal grant proposal (e.g., NIH, CDC, AHRQ) planned to be submitted within six months of the end of the project.

Through its CDC Injury Control Research Center (ICRC) grant, the CIC funds four research projects intended to fill gaps in the evidence base for developing and evaluating new injury control interventions and improving translation of effective interventions. The current projects focus on prevention of traumatic brain injury, opioid overdose, firearm violence, and suicide. To learn more about the projects, visit About the Medical College of Wisconsin Comprehensive Injury Center.

The CIC has partnered with the Kigali Genocide Memorial (KGM) and Aegis Trust to adapt their Peace and Values Education curriculum for violence prevention efforts in the United States. The Peace and Values Education program is grounded in forgiveness as a path forward to find peace, through developing skills in critical thinking, empathy, and personal responsibility. Given the epidemic of community firearm violence in the United States and the CIC’s existing expertise of community violence intervention (CVI) work, the CIC team will work with KGM Peace Educators to develop a US-Specific Peace and Values Education to further facilitate violence prevention across the state and country.

Preliminary pilot work from the MCW Global Firearm Research Collaborative has shown that applying state-of-the-art technology to wound ballistics testing provides a quantitative and visual assessment of how a bullet behaves when it is fired. Quantified information of the “damage” caused by firearms and bullets is instrumental in understanding the magnitude of their potential for injuries. It also aids in forming unbiased, evidence-based perspectives on implications for the clinical care of firearm-injured patients and policy for classifying and regulating bullets and firearms.

The MCW Disparities in Trauma Research Collaborative is anchored within MCW’s Comprehensive Injury Center (CIC) and focuses on multidisciplinary research to address disparities within the continuum of care related to traumatic injury.

Through clinical practice and research at MCW, we have observed that disparately poorer quality of life outcomes are experienced by injury survivors. Utilizing the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Framework, our researchers investigate biopsychosocial outcomes within the Social Ecological Model of Health to better understand how trauma affects people across the lifespan.

MCW Center for Health Disparities and Trauma Research: Framework for Addressing Trauma Across the Lifespan (PDF)