A recent study showed that less than 1% of the NIH budget in the last 20 years went towards research focused on the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Dissatisfied with the result, Van Ta Park Ph.D, M.P.H. and her team are working to find ten thousand individuals from the AAPI community across California who are interested in participating in research.
The need for more research
Dr. Van Ta Park, an Associate Professor at the UCSF School of Nursing, has been working as a community researcher for more than 20 years. In the last 10 years she started to notice how challenging it was to recruit Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into studies. “There seems to be this wall with many researchers,” said Van. “They don’t want to recruit AAPIs because they think they’re a small population or there are too many languages to consider. It’s really disheartening.”