Where Neighbors Guide the Science

This story is a digital preview from the forthcoming fall 2026 edition of UC Irvine Magazine.

For Dr. Dan Cooper, caring for individual patients and engaging with the communities where they live go hand in hand.

“My interest in community goes way, way back to my time as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s,” says Cooper, now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of pediatrics and associate director of the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical & Translational Science. Since its founding, UC Santa Cruz has offered a novel model that allows students to create their own majors. Cooper designed one he called “community studies.”

“I knew I was interested in going to medical school, because I saw the practice of medicine as a way to really benefit a large number of individuals,” he says. “But I also realized that we have to understand people’s communities to make a meaningful difference in their lives.”

As an undergrad, Cooper helped organize a project tutoring local children. Later, in medical school at UC San Francisco, he participated in community outreach in Mexico and Israel. After finishing his pediatrics training, Cooper completed a fellowship in pediatric pulmonology, specializing in lung diseases like asthma and cystic fibrosis. He also began conducting research. “That gave me a deep appreciation for using high-quality science to solve problems that you encounter in a community,” he says.

Across the decades, that appreciation has held steady. Cooper spoke to UC Irvine Magazine contributor Kirsten Weir about his research, his commitment to translational science and how a community focus helps UC Irvine stand out – and give back.

As a pediatric pulmonologist, what has your research entailed?

My focus has been very human-oriented. I’ve done a lot of work on physical activity and how to improve the quality of physical education and fitness testing in schools to improve children’s health. That’s important, because we know that obesity in adolescence tracks into adulthood, increasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes and even some cancers.

One example was a project that was part of a national study called Project Healthy. We worked with six schools to look at ways we could transform school P.E. and meals to prevent obesity and Type 2 diabetes. During that study, we talked to a lot of teachers and presented at parent-teacher association meetings to help families understand what we were doing. In turn, we made sure that any information we collected – such as information about kids’ cholesterol levels – was given back to the families so they could follow up with their pediatricians. Because of those efforts, families were very engaged. At the end of the first study, about 80 percent of the participants came back for the second phase of the study.

How does that tie into the work you’re doing today?

I continue to focus on physical activity. In a recent study called Project REACH, we looked at new ways to do exercise testing in kids with chronic health conditions such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease. Before we started, we worked with sickle cell organizations in Los Angeles County, meeting with parents and kids to help us shape the study. These kids are often told they can’t participate in exercise. What we learned by talking to them was that they really want to be involved in these activities. They want to know what their fitness level is and what they can do safely. That was important because it showed us how to tap into that desire. We knew we were asking them to do something they wanted to do, and it benefited the participants as much as our research.

How does society benefit from these kinds of connections?

A good example is the work we did during the pandemic. At the time, many people were in favor of closing schools to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But there were concerns. For many kids, school is the best place to be – to learn and play, for nutrition and physical activity. I helped organize a group of thought leaders around the country to write about the challenges we’d face in reopening schools. We looked at four schools in Orange County, doing studies on things like social distancing, mask wearing, viral transmission. We also worked with the Orange County Health Care Agency to create a user-friendly algorithm that school staff could use to check kids for symptoms as they returned to school. That helped lead to very safe reopening of Orange County schools.

You’re also associate director of UC Irvine’s Institute for Clinical & Translational Science. What is that program all about?

The ICTS is funded through the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program. It’s all about accelerating the way we get basic scientific information out of the lab and into the real world. We support UCI scientists working with different communities and also engage directly with the public. After the Tustin hangar fire in 2023, which created a plume of toxic smoke and asbestos-laden debris affecting neighborhood schools and homes, we worked with the Orange County Health Care Agency to hold public meetings to help the community understand what was happening. We’re also very involved with the veterans community. Recently, at a Veterans Wellness Day sponsored by OCHCA, we brought in UCI researchers to speak about the latest science on addiction in military members.

How does community engagement inform the institute’s work?

We host “Community Engagement Studios” and pay community members to serve as consultants. Our scientists present their research ideas, and they hear directly from local advisors about what’s feasible and what they think is important. That’s how we learned from kids with cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease as we designed our Project REACH study. It’s a fantastic model that helps us study questions that matter to people’s lives.

Scientists at UCI are very interested in how their work will affect their communities, and the ICTS helps them articulate how their discoveries can be translated to the public. We’ve gotten feedback from the NIH that our investigators have received grants because of the impactful way they’ve involved the public.

UC Irvine has been really proactive in community engagement, from expanding our care network to our research infrastructure. As a public academic institution, it behooves us to promote the kind of research that is good not only for our faculty and our students but for our community.