Health & Human Performance
Understanding the range of human capabilities and responses is essential to knowing how the application of human factor engineering principles can improve healthcare and performance. New challenges in human performance are emerging as machines become more capable of augmenting humans. UArizona is poised to address this need, particularly in the dynamic environments of medicine, military and athletics.
Our Health Science Competencies
Human Performance
UArizona’s Institute on Place, Wellbeing, and Performance (UA IPWP) seeks to redefine human health to fully encompass the role of the built and green environment in health and wellbeing through research, education, practice, and policy change. The IPWP’s multi-disciplinary team carries out research to quantify these factors in real time and real place scenarios.
Scan Lab
The Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) Lab at UArizona uses advanced techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), structural neuroimaging, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), cognitive neuropsychological assessment, and ambulatory monitoring of circadian rhythmicity to study the neurocircuitry underlying intelligence, risk-taking, resilience, aversive conditioning, and more. The lab studies these systems in healthy individuals and in patients suffering from various forms of brain pathology, including mild traumatic brain injury, clinical anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder, simple phobias, and depressive illness.
BIO5 Institute
UArizona’s BIO5 Institute connects and mobilizes hundreds of world-class plant, animal, and human bio scientists, engineers, physicians, and computational researchers to develop creative solutions for complex health challenges. BIO5 initiatives and projects align with areas of state and national need and for which University of Arizona faculty already have significant expertise. This strategy catalyzes the capacity to expand impact, economic opportunity and external funding opportunities.
UArizona Health Sciences By The Numbers
$173.5 M
$173,500,000 Research Awards
Top 20
Top 20 Public Research University
Health Science Laboratories and Research Centers
The University of Arizona Health Sciences reaches across the state and well beyond its borders to provide health-care education, research, patient care and service to Arizonans and their neighbors today and into the future. The below centers are just a few of the areas that support our research excellence.
Key Facts About Health Science

834 Faculty Staff

6,100 Students

4,208 Employees
Health Science News

Researchers find link between Parkinson's gene and vocal issues that could lead to earlier diagnosis
New research by University of Arizona neuroscientists suggests that a specific gene commonly associated with Parkinson’s may be behind those vocal-related issues – a finding that could help lead to earlier diagnoses and treatments for Parkinson’s patients.
Tapping into technology to improve health care research
Every second of every day, someone age 65 or older suffers a fall, and 1 in 5 of those causes damage, such as a broken bone or head injury. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 32,000 people a year die from injuries sustained during a fall.
These numbers were not lost on Jennifer Barton, director of the University of Arizona BIO5 Institute, who worried about her own father falling as he got older. As she shopped for fall-detection devices, she discovered concerning limitations for many of the products, including how obtrusive they can be in addition to certain safety risks posed by pendant devices commonly worn around the neck.
UArizona researchers develop AI-driven method for diagnosing lung disease
Researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson have developed a new way to provide earlier diagnosis of lung disease.
The method involves analyzing metabolites, small molecules that are produced through cellular metabolic reactions. When normal cells transform into diseased cells, their metabolic processes change, and thus their metabolites also change.
Many diseases have a unique metabolite “fingerprint.” The UArizona-developed technology uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify these fingerprints, potentially identifying diseases earlier than methods currently used.
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