Founding
Story
The Center for Transformative Health began as the COVID Prevention Center, founded in recognition that the public health infrastructure meant to protect Houston's communities was insufficient when a major threat arrived. As the work expanded beyond pandemic response, the center grew into the Center for Transformative Health to reflect a broader research agenda, one rooted in the founding insight that communities most exposed to public health failures deserve the evidence, frameworks, and infrastructure to understand and respond to the conditions shaping their health.
Why CTH was founded.
CTH was founded on a recognition that COVID made unavoidable: that the public health infrastructure meant to protect Houston's communities — particularly the Black, Hispanic, and historically excluded communities served by Texas Southern University — was insufficient when a major threat arrived. Communities that had long known their health systems were under-resourced experienced what that meant in real time, in mortality, in delayed access to information, in disrupted care.
The Center was created because the gap between the science available to well-resourced institutions and the science available to the communities most affected by health crises is itself a public health problem. Closing that gap requires more than research — it requires the sustained presence of a research enterprise rooted in the communities it serves, accountable to them, and structured to translate evidence into action.
The CTH/IUPH Model
CTH operates in deliberate partnership with the Institute of Urban Public Health, which serves as the Center's translational arm. CTH conducts the research — studies, frameworks, publications, federal proposals. IUPH operationalizes that research into community-facing programs, partnerships, and place-based work across Houston. The two entities are paired by design, each accountable for half of a single mission: to produce knowledge with communities and to move that knowledge into the practices, programs, and infrastructure that change health on the ground.