Measuring Our Impact Across Indiana
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.
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
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 researchIf 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.
