The USC School of Social Work and the Child and Adolescent Services Research Center (CASRC) at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, which specializes in longitudinal studies of children at risk for developing mental disorders, have announced a partnership to create a synergy of resources to help advance the field of child mental health and child welfare.

At the heart of the agreement – specifically between CASRC and the school's research center, the Hamovitch Center for Science in the Human Services – is a rigorous collaboration process designed to advance research development and enable the organizations to compete more effectively for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants by creating better study designs that yield more credible findings.

"This agreement brings the USC School of Social Work, one of the country's prime research schools, closer to CASRC, which has a robust research infrastructure with a consortium base of 100 investigators and staff, and an excellent NIH funding record," said Haluk Soydan, director of the Hamovitch Center for Science in the Human Services.

The NIH, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research. The NIH invests more than $28 billion annually in medical, health and mental health-related research, and more than 80 percent of that is awarded through nearly 50,000 grants to researchers at institutions around the world.

"The overall goal of the collaborative relationship is to enhance the development of research scientist careers and innovative, competitive applications to NIH," said CASRC Director John Landsverk, who is also a research professor in the school.

In order to do this, both organizations will participate in cross-institution research development and training of young research scientists; development of NIH-funded research in child mental health care in Los Angeles County; support of the school's graduate education initiatives in San Diego County; and consideration of joint appointments for selected research scientists at CASRC and the school.

Social work faculty researchers and PhD students will also have access to CASRC's unique data sets.

Landsverk said the social work profession is massively involved in providing both service providers and leadership to the public child mental health and child welfare service systems in the United States. The collaboration with the USC School of Social Work is ideal because it produces many social workers in Southern California, and it is committed to obtaining federal funding to support "good science to examine better models for service delivery in these public systems," he said.