Office of Diversity and Health Disparities (ODHD)

What We Do:

To enhance the pool of underrepresented populations in the sciences, the National Institute on Drug Abuse established the Office of Diversity and Health Disparities (ODHD) 20 years ago. The mission of the ODHD is to strengthen the NIDA extramural research portfolio through a more diverse and robust extramural research workforce, attracting and retaining talented individuals from all populations in order to fulfill the mission of NIDA. The ODHD’s goals are to:

  1. Promote and support underrepresented scholars and researchers actively participating in research;
  2. Enhance the pool of underrepresented scholars and researchers independently funded to conduct substance abuse research;
  3. Ensure that research addressing health disparities is adequately represented in NIDA’-supported substance abuse research.

Underrepresented researchers face a number of challenges that influence their success in obtaining independent support from NIDA, the NIH, and other federal funding agencies.  Some of these challenges include limited/poor mentoring, lack of adequate knowledge of NIH funding opportunities and processes, limited access to novel high priority research projects and design, low publication records, and limited professional networking to successfully bridge to the next career level.  Collectively, these factors impact NIDA's efforts to retain underrepresented investigators conducting substance abuse research and further develop the research infrastructure within this community.  To that end, NIDA has implemented several key early stage outreach programs which play a vital role at recruiting, training, and retaining underrepresented researchers from underrepresented backgrounds in order to develop and support their research careers.

In addition, NIDA has a Diversity Consortium that includes staff across NIDA Scientific Divisions and Offices who help guide the direction of activities related to diversity within the institute and who promote diversity in the extramural community.  The committee reviews all Diversity Supplement Applications, provides feedback to the mentor and diversity supplement candidate, and makes recommendations for support of diversity supplement applications NIDA Diversity Supplement Program.

Office of Diversity and Health Disparities Research Training Programs by Career Level


 

ODHD Staff:

Mailing Address:

Office of Diversity and Health Disparities
National Institute on Drug Abuse/NIH
6001 Executive Boulevard
Room 3105, MSC 9567
Bethesda, Maryland 20892-9567