Read “IU Grand Challenges: Making Life Better for Hoosiers Everywhere”

The Grand Challenges publication includes tributes from Governor Holcomb and IU Board of Trustees Chair Michael Mirro, M.D., to President McRobbie for his bold vision in creating the Grand Challenges program. You will also learn more about how IU is leveraging the combined resources of the university and our many partners to address issues of critical importance in Indiana and around the globe.

Read "IU Grand Challenges: Making Life Better for Hoosiers Everywhere"

Measuring Our Impact Across Indiana

Community-minded. Collaborative. Solutions-focused. At Indiana University, we work every day to solve pressing challenges with one focus in mind: making life better for Hoosiers everywhere.

Read about a new statewide survey of Hoosiers' thoughts on challenges facing the state and the role universities play in addressing them, commissioned as part of the Indiana University Grand Challenges program.

We define Grand Challenges as major, focused, and large-scale problems facing humanity that can be solved only by teams of dedicated researchers working across disciplines in collaboration with community partners. IU has three Grand Challenges initiatives in progress: Precision Health, Prepared for Environmental Change, and Responding to the Addictions Crisis. 

Scott Long, Mayor of Wabash, Indiana

It's important for universities like IU to come alongside communities that don't have the resources. We can tap into IU to help us with this battle.

Mayor Scott Long of Wabash, Ind. on his collaboration with the Indiana University Addictions Grand Challenge Initiative

Together, we are tackling economic, social, and environmental problems that challenge our families and communities across our state. Four features define our impact:

Family & Community

From fighting Alzheimer’s to confronting the addictions crisis, we measure our impact on how Grand Challenges research helps individual Hoosiers and improves communities, our economy and the quality of life in Indiana.

 

Scale

Our commitment to Hoosiers means we’ve dedicated hundreds of faculty from dozens of schools across six IU campuses so that our work matches the scale of the Grand Challenges we seek to address.

 

Commitment

Each Grand Challenge initiative reflects a commitment to focusing IU’s resources—financial and otherwise—in new and strategic ways to increase efficiency, drive innovation, and apply new solutions that benefit Hoosiers everywhere.

 

Collaboration

We work with and for our most critical partners, from mayors and elected officials, business leaders and community organizations. Solving our grandest challenges calls us to work together.

 

Our Grand Challenges

Precision Health Initiative

The goal of precision medicine is to get the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Our first Grand Challenge, the Precision Health Initiative (PHI), announced in 2016, aims to accomplish that goal. PHI is optimizing the prevention and treatment of human diseases such as hard-to-treat cancers, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease through rigorous study of genetic, developmental, behavioral, and environmental factors.

Learn more about the Precision Health Initiative

Prepared for Environmental Change

Our second Grand Challenge, Prepared for Environmental Change, started in early 2017. A broad, bipartisan coalition of researchers, government and business leaders, and nonprofit and community organizations are joining together to help Indiana better prepare and plan for the environmental changes that are impacting the way we live, grow food, and conduct business. 

Learn more about Prepared for Environmental Change

Responding to the Addictions Crisis

Our third Grand Challenge, Responding to the Addictions Crisis, was launched in late 2017. Its goals are to curtail addiction in Indiana, decrease opioid overdose deaths, and reduce the number of babies born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome. With many partners, this initiative is one of the nation’s most comprehensive state-based responses to the opioid addiction crisis—and the largest led by a university.

Learn more about the Addictions Crisis
Emily Styron, Mayor of Zionsville, Indiana

I think that this is an opportunity for our community to define what mitigating climate change looks like for us. For our businesses, for our residents, for our students, for people of all ages. What I’m excited about is that this is a community-based approach that is using science to help inform us of how we develop policy.

Mayor Emily Styron of Zionsville, Ind. on her community’s collaboration with IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute

At Indiana University, we believe in the power of discovery to change the course of human history. This power is rooted in the work of dedicated researchers, practitioners, and experts from all disciplines and sectors, in projects both big and small. Backed by more than 1,200 faculty and thousands of students and staff, as well as more than 200 research centers across seven statewide campuses, IU’s research initiatives are bold, data-driven, solution-focused, and fueled by an insatiable curiosity that is capable of leading the next frontier in human progress.

Learn more about IU research

If you would like to contribute to the Grand Challenges Program, please consider a donation to the Grand Challenges Fund which supports initiatives, including but not limited to, Responding to the Addictions Crisis, Prepared for Environmental Change, and Precision Health Initiative.

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