‘Improving our society’: Pitt researchers receive $5 million grant for research on systemic racism

The National Institute of Health awarded Pitt’s schools of medicine and social work a $5 million grant to test the effectiveness of the Racial Equity Consciousness Institute intervention in addressing systemic racism. 

Ron Idoko, the founding director of RECI, described the fundamental work of the institution as “[helping] people learn about the complexities and pervasiveness of racism and how to cultivate racial equity.”

Pitt researchers will conduct a randomized control trial — during which participants will receive the RECI intervention or implicit bias training — over the course of eight weeks at 30 different institutions across the country, including Duke University and the University of Michigan. The effects will be measured over the following two years using surveys and qualitative interviews with participants, data from the universities and functional brain imaging.

Idoko, who is also associate director of the Center on Race and Social Problems, summarized what researchers hope to accomplish from the study.

“Our goal is to really think about how effective are we in helping people navigate this topic, building their understanding and effectively developing practices and behaviors towards the change they want to see,” Idoko said. “That’s the ultimate measure of the work that we do … do people feel like they’re better positioned to do the work of cultivating racial equity, improving our society for the betterment of all?”

Idoko said he wants people to understand that “learning how to affect this sort of change in our society is almost a science.”

“The way I frame it, there is a vaccine for racism,” Idoko said. “There is a tested, evidence-based way that we can learn how to not just understand the society that we live in, but learn how to affect change in it … we have to be willing to leverage the tools and resources that help us do that, right? And so our goal is to be one of those tools, be one of those resources, and to show the evidence behind the work that we do so that people can engage [in] this confidently.”

Doris Rubio, assistant vice chancellor for clinical research, education and training and director of the Institute for Clinical Research Education, said she was motivated to seek evidence for the effectiveness of RECI because her participation in it “significantly changed [her].”

“My colleagues across the country, who are researchers, always like evidence, and they want to know, ‘How effective is [RECI]? Where’s the data?’” Rubio said. “We needed to generate the data to show that, in fact, we have evidence that RECI does change behavior.”

Rubio wants to demonstrate the effectiveness of RECI on a national level.

“I think RECI needs to be scaled across the country,” Rubio said. “I think the more people who get RECI, the better off this country will be.”

Gretchen White, an assistant professor of medicine, epidemiology and clinical and translational science, is providing general research oversight to the study. She commented on Pitt’s ability to address structural racism.

“I think that Pitt is really uniquely positioned to address such complicated issues like this because we have so many different disciplines where people are really experts within the University,” White said. “One of the things that’s really cool about this research study is that it’s people in the department of medicine and people in social work and people in business and psychology and psychiatry.”

White elaborated on the multidisciplinary nature of the research. She mentioned the functional brain imaging that will be applied in a “unique way,” using the imaging to look at changes in the brain before and after intervention. Previous research has shown that racial anxiety affects the brain.

“It’s really diverse research that can’t be done everywhere, but it can be done at Pitt,” White said. “I think that this really shows that we are a leader in being innovative here at Pitt.”

Idoko similarly addressed Pitt’s role as an innovator, referencing how the University developed the polio vaccine.

“That was a major moment in this university’s history,” Idoko said. “If we can say that there is an effective, evidence-based way to address systemic racism, that becomes a tool for a lot of people around the world to think about addressing this challenge on a global scale.”