Research is a top priority at the School of Public Health.  We seek to discover what threatens and compromises the public's health and to find solutions that will enhance the lives of people across North Carolina and around the world.

We dedicate our research to the pursuit of discovery, for discovery holds the key to change.  We seek to discover new knowledge that will better lives everywhere and eliminate health-related disparities.  And we teach students how to research effectively.

We often participate on collaborative, interdisciplinary research teams with other departments and schools at UNC, other universities, and other public health organizations.  Our research takes place around the world, in our local communities and on campus in our state-of-the-art laboratories.

Some of the public health challenges our researchers are studying include:

• The link between nutrition, cancer risk and prevention
  
  
• The genetics of obesity and its prevention and treatment
  
  
• The connection between a person's diet and viral infections
  
  
• How to protect the safety and purity of air and drinking water
  
  
• How to restore contaminated environments
  
  
• The effects of contaminant exposure on human populations
  
  
• The role of genes in the development of melanoma and cancers of the breast, colon and prostate
  
  
• The ways that HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria influence one another and spread in human populations
  
  
• The need for a SARS vaccine
  
  
• The causes of health disparities among different racial, ethnic and socio-economic groups
  
  
• Disaster response.