 Fran Norris (photo by Ed Chapin, Chapin
Photography)
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 Sandro Galea (photo courtesy of Sandro Galea)
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A five-year, $3.89 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been
granted to Dartmouth Medical School
(DMS), in collaboration with several organizations, to launch a National Center
for Disaster Mental Health Research (NCDMHR). The center will conduct long-term
studies that address important questions concerning post-disaster resilience
and wellness.
Investigators from five prominent universities in four regions of the
country will contribute to this national effort. Partners include DMS, the University of Michigan, Medical University of South Carolina, Yale University, and the University of Oklahoma.
“We’re going to capitalize on the expertise of professionals around the
country to establish a center that is methodologically creative, capable of
rapid response, and responsive to the needs of the scientific, policy, and
practitioner communities,” says Fran Norris, the principal investigator and a
research professor of psychiatry at DMS. Norris will be the center’s
director.
Norris and her co-principal investigator Sandro Galea, associate professor
of epidemiology in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan,
stress the importance of the connections between the partner institutions.
Galea will serve as the center’s research director.
“We need to understand the health consequences of disasters much better than
we do now in order to mitigate them,” he says.
The investigators involved in the NCDMHR have experience in responding to
and conducting mental health research in the wake of major disasters, such as
Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew, and Katrina; the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995; the
1999 mud slides in Mexico; the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; and the Madrid
bombing in 2004.
Norris, a community psychologist, has been conducting research on the
psychosocial consequences of disasters for more than 20 years. Since Hurricane
Katrina, she has been the National Cross-Site Evaluator for the federally
funded Crisis Counseling Assistance and Training Program.
“One of the most beneficial pieces of this project will be the ability to
launch epidemiological research immediately in the aftermath of a disaster, a
major barrier to effective research in this field,” says Norris, who is also a
research associate at the Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) in White River Junction, Vt.
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