UK played host Monday to Monica Bernoulli, the director of the National Institutes of Health.

She's the second woman to head the NIH.

But a gnarly looked at some student based research funded by the Institute and talked about the Care for Health program, which helps with health care research down to the community level.

More about that in tonight's look at medical news.

We've got some problems in the United States.

I'm very worried from my post and I know you all share this.

Our life expectancy is poor compared to our peer nations.

Here we are.

There are many wealthy nations here with much better life expectancy that we have and some that aren't even so wealthy.

The other big numbers are the these diseases of despair, which are very, very challenging and disproportionately affect certain communities and affect communities where we're not doing research, which is why we really want to be in those communities to try to help solve those problems.

Having Danai as director and the whole Leadership Committee visiting UK.

First of all, it's an enormous opportunity to have them with us.

And basically these are the people who are leading the signs for forward and having a chance to talk with them about my research and how we can make the science moving forward a little bit more smoother and doing all the research together and being able to have a face time basically with your NIH director.

It means a lot.

Last week, NIH launched Care for Health, a new initiative that to engage care providers and patients on the front lines of health in developing ways to improve interventions for common challenges.

Every community is different.

The research that is meaningful to every community is going to be different.

So we can't go in saying, you know, here's here's what you need to do.

Here's the research you need to do.

We have to go in and say, here's a huge list of various opportunities.

I don't know, 20, 30, 40, whatever, different clinical research opportunities and that community and that those care providers are going to pick which ones are meaningful to them.

One of the goals that we want to achieve a scientist is being able to communicate our science a little bit more with the people who are outside the field of science.

By doing science, you can help physicians and of course, the health care community to better understand why we have a disease.

Pew Trust did a survey recently that was very interesting, asking people, asking people to say who they trusted more for, who they trusted for care, for their health information.

The very highest trust was that their primary care providers.

We're launching this new primary care research network because we want to put the research into the hands of people who are trusted so that everybody can have the benefit.

The university of Kentucky received $145.6 million in grants and contracts from the NIH and the 2023 fiscal year.

With that funding going towards health care research projects.