UTMB SON's RISE Center focuses on six key areas that concentrate on optimizing health across the discovery to translation spectrum. These areas of research excellence are:

• Innovative Interventions (Digital Health Technology): Research that deploys rare and novel strategies for understanding, interpreting, translating, gathering or otherwise using data and information to draw conclusions and ask important questions. Innovative interventions include big data analysis, new tools and technology, and utilizing established concepts in new ways.
• Population Health/Health Disparities: Research that examines the differences in quality, outcomes and access of health and health care across populations. Areas of study include health inequities in vulnerable populations, social injustice, underserved populations, global health, and environmental influences.
• Chronic Disease, Disability, and Self-Management: Research that examines lifestyle, environmental and/or genetic factors that lead to chronic disease (e.g., diabetes, cardiovascular disease, pain management, cancer fatigue, and childbearing recovery) and disability to develop improved, personalized strategies to treat and prevent adverse symptoms and enhance self-management across diverse populations and settings.
• Precision Health Care: Customizing evidence-based approaches to health that incorporate genomics, environmental factors and lifestyle.
• Integrative Health Across the Lifespan: Research that focuses on the whole person and the entire community. It is informed by scientific evidence and makes use of all appropriate therapeutic, preventive and research approaches with the goal of optimal health and wellness across the lifespan.
• Nursing Education: Research that is faculty-and-student- centered. Education research focuses on the science of learning and the science of teaching. The outcome is related to how well the educational approaches and assessments resulted in nurses providing excellent patient care.

Each of these six areas of excellence provide a platform for building research profiles and connectivity within a scientific community. UTMB SON researchers will use resources from each to augment their expertise. Essential underpinnings of these areas include the exploration of science across the age continuum and the quest for knowledge that must be explored in populations, both well and ill.