About Us 
The University of Texas Prevention Research Center (UTPRC) unites accomplished researchers and dedicated community leaders in a common goal: improving the health of children and adolescents in Texas.
The mission of the UTPRC is to impact child and adolescent health through a collaboration of academic, public health, and community partnerships engaged in scholarly, community-based prevention research, research translation, and education.
In line with this mission, UTPRC researchers will focus the next five years on adolescent sexual health. The core research will center around mobilizing community partnerships for effective sexual health education in middle school. Through a collaborative research study, investigators will develop, implement, and evaluate a dissemination intervention to get effective sexual health programs into middle schools in Harris County.
The UTPRC also conducts innovative research programs and prevention strategies in a range of other health areas, such as cancer prevention and control, and epilepsy self-management.
Community collaboration is one of the keys to the UTPRC’s success. The researchers’ accomplishments would be limited if not for the The Community Advisory Group, which includes representatives from more than 50 community, government, medical, and academic agencies, who help guide the UTPRC’s research agenda as well as partner with investigators on research projects. The UTPRC also provides training and education opportunities for researchers and community members, such as the University of Texas Prevention Research Center Institute for Sexual Health and the John P. McGovern Award Lecture Series.
The UTPRC was founded in 1986 as one of the first three of the eventual 35 centers in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Prevention Research Center Program. It is part of The University of Texas School of Public Health in the UT Health Science Center system, located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, and includes researchers in Dallas, Brownsville, El Paso, Austin, and San Antonio.
