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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today I speak with Dr. Donald Warren, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health and a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe about the grand opening of the Great Plains Hub in Rapid City, South Dakota, and some of the life-saving public health research projects that are launching there. Let's listen.

Dr. Donald Warren, thank you so much for coming back to public health on call. And today you're here to talk to us about the grand opening of the Great Plains Hub for the Johns Hopkins Center

for Indigenous Health. Can you tell us a little bit about the hub and what it's hoping to accomplish? Yeah, our Center for Indigenous Health. Can you tell us a little bit about the hub and what it's

hoping to accomplish? Yeah, our Center for Indigenous Health, of course, is housed at the

Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, but of our 350-plus employees, only about 20

are located in Baltimore. So we have hubs throughout the country, primarily located near the tribal populations that we work with.

So we have a southwest hub with multiple sites in New Mexico and Arizona and a Great Lakes

Hub located in Duluth, Minnesota.

And our brand new hub is the Great Plains Hub located in Rapid City, South Dakota.

And the reason we have these hubs is that much of the research that we do is community-based.

And we recognize that to do effective community engagement that can't be done from a computer in Baltimore,

it has to really be with the communities.

So we've been able to be very successful with pursuing and acquiring

significant research grants and other resources to engage communities and to provide community

driven research in which we're also hiring community members to work with us. So we're very

excited about the emerging opportunities in the Great Plains.

So tell us a little bit about the actual hub itself.

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