Belmont University’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (CPHS) is establishing a new Center for Abundance, Resilience, Excellence, and Spirituality (CARES). CPHS CARES will bring together expertise from the College’s seven disciplines—mental health counseling, pharmacy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, social work, public health, and exercise science—to solve the world’s most complex problems and help communities thrive. CPHS CARES will be the first of its kind in the country.
Uniquely positioned in the nation’s health care capital, CPHS CARES will address the significant transformation taking place across the health care industry thanks to a variety of factors including the integration of AI and digital health in nearly all aspects of the system and our society. The Center will leverage many existing partnerships across the college and the institution with a variety of health care organizations that are interested in doing this important work and will focus on advancing health and human potential through the expertise of a team of world-renowned experts.
“We have no shortage of ideas and innovation in health care,” said CPHS Dean Dr. Sharrel Pinto, who has founded and led two successful innovation centers throughout her career. “But there is an opportunity for us to see through the implementation of those ideas to serve communities and solve the problems that plague us. We are positioned to bring together experts from organizations and diverse backgrounds who work together to identify and solve these multi-faceted problems. While many health care Centers leverage the skills of a single profession or a handful of professions, we will be leveraging the strengths of 7 key health and health-related fields to focus on living healthy well-rounded lives and enhancing the human potential. This opens the opportunity to provide care and outreach for a broad range of community members and organizations, including health related and non-health related organizations, for profit and non-profit entities, local, state or global agencies, and more.”
Belmont has long been a teaching institution with programs in the health professions that have a rich history of excellence in community engagement and practice-based project work. This increasing success continues to drive a strong desire to do more interdisciplinary work and give back to communities in new and meaningful ways. Faculty are eager to share their expertise and apply their knowledge to work collaboratively on projects that will make impactful change in the communities we serve, in Nashville or across the globe. CARES will provide the critical infrastructure and the foundational base needed to accelerate this work.
By leveraging our location in Nashville, the creative and entrepreneurial talent in our city and the broad expertise apparent across our campus all across colleagues, CARES is well-positioned to solve the world’s most complex, multi-faceted problems. Through the application of transdisciplinary practice-based work, while bridging the gap from bench-to-bedside (and beyond) translational work, CARES hopes to expand teaching, research, practice and community outreach to new heights and unwrap the untapped human potential to allow communities to thrive.