International Activities

Faculty and staff of IPRC participate in international activities that are varied in type. These activities range from participating in collaborative research efforts, to technical assistance, and training by individuals from the Center. Some recent activities are listed below.

UNC IPRC Named Affiliate Center for Safe Communities 

UNC IPRC has become an Affiliate Safe Community Support Centre of the Division of Social medicine of the Karolinska Institutet.  Under the agreement, UNC IPRC and the Karolinska Institutet will work together to seek funds and design strategies to evaluate the Safe Communities Programs and to develop effective training in violence prevention. The Safe Communities programs were created and have been managed by the Karolinska Institutet for several decades. 

UNC IPRC’s expertise on evaluation and training will be applied through several collaborative strategies. Some efforts will focus on using the PREVENT model for training while further evaluation strategies will be developed through the work of Dr. Kant Bangdiwala, Andrés Villaveces, and Carol Runyan. The photo below shows IPRC Deputy Director, Dr. Andrés Villiaveces (left) with Dr. Leif Svandström signing a memorandum of understanding for the two organizations. 

Announcement in the Safe Communities Newsletter (PDF)

The 9th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion

The 9th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion was held in Merida, Mexico, March 15-18, 2008. Drs Shrikant Bangdiwala, Tamera Coyne-Beasley, Carol Runyan, and Andrés Villaveces, all IPRC Core faculty members, gave presentations at the conference.  The following is a summary of their activities.

A pre-conference workshop was conducted by Drs. Shrikant Bangdiwala, research associate professor, biostatistics, and Andrés Villaveces, research assistant professor, epidemiology.  This day-long workshop, Methodological considerations for injury prevention and safety promotion research was designed for graduate students, young researchers and practitioners of public health.  The goals were to acquaint participants with research methods specific to injury control and safety promotion; increase the ability of participants from multiple backgrounds to work together to carry out successful projects; and increase the capacity for research in this area.

Dr. Tamera Coyne-Beasley, associate professor, pediatrics and social medicine presented at the conference.  Her paper was entitled:  Delinquency & substance abuse among early adolescents who self-report neglect from the LONGSCAN/NEGLECT dataset. 

Dr. Carol Runyan served on a Panel on the Role of Injury Control Research Centers in Intervention Evaluation and Translation.  She was be joined by Andrea Gielen, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Control Research and Policy and Dr. Beth Ebel, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and a staff member for the Injury Free Coalition for Kids.  Dr. Richard J. Waxweiler, associate director for extramural research at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a panel member as well as moderator of this session. In a separate session, Dr. Runyan presented a poster based on data from the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health entitled: Employment, violence and delinquency among U.S. adolescents: How are they related?

As part of a special session, Dr. Villaveces was a member of the Panel on Advances in Behavioral Approaches to Injury and Violence Prevention. This panel was moderated by Dr. Gielen. Dr. Villaveces’s presentation for this panel was entitled:  Behavioral modifications aimed at enhancing primary prevention of violence through the PREVENT Institute. In addition to this panel discussion, he presented The evolution of injury prevention concepts from the 19th to the 21st century as part of the program Capacity Building-Development and Infrastructure with moderator Dr. David Meddings.

Dr. Shrikant Bangdiwala participated in the ongoing training and capacity building program of the WHO Collaborating Centre of the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) of the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. This program aims to develop the capacity of transportation and health sector personnel in prevention and control of transport related injuries. As part of this collaboration, Dr. Bangdiwala provides statistical consultation for the faculty and students of the program.

Drs. Michael Peck and S. Bangdiwala are collaborating with the NC Jaycee Burn Center to determine the correlation between economic indicators and mortality rates in Eastern European countries such as Hungary and Poland.

Dr. Andrés Villaveces collaborated with the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) to edit a Spanish version of a curriculum to train practitioners in youth violence prevention. The curriculum will be promoted and used in several Latin-American countries. Dr. A. Villaveces is advising the Cisalva Institute of the University of El Valle in Colombia on injury surveillance projects as well as working on a pilot project to study the built environment and injuries in a large metropolitan area. Dr. A. Villaveces participated as a faculty member in an injury prevention training course in Ghana. The course is organized by the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center at the University of Washington. Dr. A. Villaveces collaborated with the United Nations Development Program in El Salvador in a conference about the health consequences of violence. Dr. A Villaveces collaborated with the small arms survey of the University of Geneva on a report about perceptions of safety related to firearms among the population of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Dr. Desmond Runyan serves on the Non-Governmental Organization Advisory Panel for the U.N. Secretary General’s Study of Children and Violence, representing the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. As a part of this group, Runyan was involved in organizing the North American Consultation for the study. Dr. D. Runyan served as consultant to UNICEF on an international survey of child discipline. Runyan helped UNICEF develop a group of child discipline questions for the Maltreatment Classification Study that are being fielded in 60 developing countries that may serve as an indicator for harsh punishment.

Drs. Carol Runyan, D. Runyan, and Kevin Guskiewicz are collaborating with the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation to develop new research on: youth labor (C. Runyan), traumatic brain injury in young children (D. Runyan) and concussions in hockey (K. Guskiewicz) as well as the implementation of a graduate student exchange program between the U. S. and Canada.