FDA’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity (OMHHE) leads efforts to advance minority health and health equity- focused regulatory science research. To support research efforts, OMHHE engages across all FDA product centers and offices, as well as a broad range of stakeholders, including academia, minority-serving institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations.

OMHHE leverages various funding mechanisms, collaborations, and partnerships to advance its mission by establishing new scientific initiatives and supporting novel health disparity and health equity-focused intramural and extramural research. The OMHHE Challenge Grants support intramural research in collaboration with FDA scientists. The OMHHE extramural research program supports extramural research in collaboration with diverse organizations through OMHHE Innovation Award grants, the Broad Agency Announcements, the Centers of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation, Research Collaboration Agreements, and Inter-Agency Agreements.

OMHHE advances regulatory science by supporting research that contributes to the reduction of health disparities and advancement of health equity. For example, supporting research that contributes to advancing inclusion of racial and ethnic minority populations in clinical trials, and the continued evaluation of FDA regulated products by demographic data including, but not limited to, ethnicity, race, age, and geography. OMHHE also advances scientific workforce diversity by supporting post-doctoral fellowship programs such as the Genomic Science and Health Equity (GSHE) Postdoctoral Fellowship, a joint program with the FDA OMHHE and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).