PROJECT SUMMARY The Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions The HCHDS was established in 2002 with funding from the NCMHD-EXPORT Center program and renewed under the COE program in 2006 and 2011. Our primary objective is to be a national resource for advancing the science of health equity and identifying and promulgating solutions for reducing and eliminating health disparities. Based in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, we promote and encourage health disparities research, training and community engagement using the resources of the Johns Hopkins Schools of Public Health, Medicine and Nursing. Over the next five years we propose to conduct three major research projects that primarily focus on interpersonal and community-level influences. The cross-cutting theme for these projects is “exploring and addressing the impact of place-based determinants in health disparities among African Americans.” We define place broadly as the physical/built environment, sociocultural environment, and the healthcare system. The physical/built environments include contextual/distal factors that influence outcomes such as household, neighborhood, and community level factors. Sociocultural environment includes family and community norms, social support, social networks, social connectedness, and segregation by race/ethnicity, rurality, socioeconomic status, and language. The healthcare system includes the influence of local healthcare market characteristics, the regulatory environment, and policy level factors.