The ACT Center for Tobacco Treatment Education and Research has been helping Mississippians quit tobacco since 1999. Along with direct treatment of patients, training and community outreach, the center's wide variety of research includes clinical trials of promising drugs and basic-science investigations into the genetics of nicotine dependence. Genetics research is helping to identify which medications work best for certain individuals and for increasing understanding of the complexities of nicotine addiction.

The Cancer Institute, led by Dr. Lucio Miele, combines basic science research, clinical trials of novel drugs and therapies and cutting-edge patient care. The institute is comprised of oncologists, radiologists, biochemists, microbiologists, pathologists and many other professionals. Many of the same doctors serving patients are the same physician-scientists engaging in oncology research. They study cancer genetics, seek to identify biomarkers for certain cancers and create next-generation drugs. The institute's overall goal is to improve the prevention and treatment of cancer.

In an effort to integrate the various cardiovascular and renal research programs at UMMC, the Cardiovascular-Renal Research Center (CRRC) was established. With a long history of discovery, the center's wide-ranging investigations, led by Dr. Joey Granger, target the functions, interconnections and prevention of hypertension, heart, vascular and kidney diseases. The center is funded by Cardiovascular Dynamics and their Control, a 41-year program project grant from the National Institutes of Health, and several other NIH and American Heart Association grants.

The Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities works to integrate ethical decision making into the Medical Center's three missions: education, health care and research. The idea is to make ethics seamless, as it is in life, when nearly every activity can be viewed through a prism of right and wrong behavior. Incorporating ethics into health-care training and practice is relatively straightforward but research offers many paths.

The Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience (CPN) tackles the neurobiology behind diseases and disorders such as depression and alcoholism. By relying on multidisciplinary teams - a mix of investigators and clinicians specializing in different areas - investigators study sleep disorders, major depression disorders and substance abuse work to draw lines between basic neurobiology and clinical psychiatry.  The CPN provides a diverse and nationally competitive research environment highly conducive to productive and modern research in psychiatric neuroscience.

The MIND Center seeks to uncover the causes and risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. Founded in 2010, the center's inaugural study is a large NIH-funded project that includes collaboration with scientists at top universities in the U.S. and that analyzes how brains age. By acquiring new health data on the nearly 16,000 members of the ARIC Study and combining it with data collected during ARIC's 20-year-plus history, center director Dr. Thomas Mosley and his fellow investigators are opening a unique window into physiological changes beginning in middle age that can culminate in Alzheimer's later in life.

The Mississippi Institute for the Improvement of Geographic Minority Health (MIGMH) was established through a competitive grant awarded by the Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health Research in September 2006. The Institute focuses on some of the key indicators of health status in Mississippi and targets mechanisms to increase the knowledge surrounding these conditions along with strategies to improve them. The MIGMH program is a targeted and multifaceted approach for eliminating health disparities through a multi-partner effort, involving institutions of higher education, state and local health agencies, faith and community-based organizations, healthcare organizations, and other stakeholders.

The University Comprehensive Stroke Center focuses on research, education and clinical care for stroke, the leading cause of disability in the United States. Mississippi lies in the "Stroke Belt," a region of the country with the highest death rate due to stroke. The center's multidisciplinary team fills stroke-specific needs, including education of stroke providers and research on reducing disparities in stroke outcomes.

The Women's Health Research Center was created in 2009 with the realization that improvement of women's health represents a major unmet health-care need for Mississippi and that research devoted to women's health would form the cornerstone of efforts to meet these needs. Led by Dr. Jane Reckelhoff, the center fosters basic and clinical research into sex-based differences in diseases and health issues specific to women. It also promotes education of basic and clinical researchers, physicians, medical students and the general public in the area of women's health.