NIH

Brain injury is the most dreaded result of critical illness. For more than half a million Americans who suffer sudden cardiac arrest each year, current therapies are inadequate and outcomes are abysmal. Among more than 100,000 patients who regain pulses, severe global brain injury is common and the major driver of both morbidity and mortality. This is a major public health problem. My proposal addresses two important, potentially preventable causes of death and disability due to post-arrest brain injury.

The studies designed in this application will result in the generation of two unique experimental tools for understanding a newly identified regulator of intestinal lipid absorption and how intestinal lipid absorption contributes to whole-body energy balance.

Targeted implementation strategies are needed to fully realize the benefits of evidence-based practice and the appropriate use of dental sealants by dental providers. The long-term goal of our program of research is to foster the effective implementation of evidence-based guidelines in large, multi-site dental practices. The first step and objective of this proposal is to design an implementation strategy for the American Dental Association’s (ADA) pit-and-fissure sealant guideline targeting root causes of low rates of adherence by dental providers.

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a devastating psychiatric disorder with limited treatment options. Disruptions in cortical circuitry are a key feature of SZ pathology and pathophysiology. Reduced dendritic spine density (DSD) in cortical layer 3 is among the most consistently observed cortical circuit abnormalities in postmortem studies of SZ, affecting multiple brain regions including the superior temporal gyrus (STG).

To err is human. However, when physicians make mistakes, people can die. Most efforts to reduce the number of errors made by physicians begin with the premise that decisions reflect knowledge, attitudes, and external constraints. Based on insights from the behavioral science literature, as well as work done during my mentored career development award, I argue that heuristics (intuitive judgments) play an important role in the decision making of physicians - particularly for time-sensitive conditions (e.g. trauma triage, sepsis, stroke).

This interdisciplinary training program will provide scholars with didactic and mentor-driven training in clinical emergency care research. The program will extend existing resources and develop specific new curriculum to move young investigators into a high trajectory for an investigative career specifically focused on emergency care.

My overall career goal is to become an independent physician-scientist conducting interdisciplinary, patient-centered clinical research to improve sexual function in aging women. This K23 Career Development Award will provide me with the additional experience and skills to reach this goal.

Hemorrhage following traumatic injury is estimated to be responsible for over 40% of all trauma-related deaths. Ongoing traumatic blood loss is complicated by the well-known ‘lethal triad’ of coagulopathy, hypothermia and acidosis which results in further unbridled hemorrhage. Uncontrolled bleeding, resultant shock and organ dysfunction remain the leading causes of early in-hospital mortality.

In the last thirty years the United States witnessed a transformation of the critical care delivery system marked by a simultaneous decrease in the number of hospitals providing critical care and an increase in the total number of intensive care unit beds. As a consequence, the US is not only providing more intensive care, but also concentrating this care in ever fewer numbers of hospitals. In an ongoing career-development award (K08) funded by the NHLBI, the applicant is studying the clinical impact of these changes on patient outcomes at the regional level.

My research over the last 25 years has been unique in providing data and scientific leadership on the path towards a prevention vaccine for non-viral cancers. Cancer immunotherapy is now a reality and both academia and pharmaceutical companies are focusing on the next best treatment for advanced cancer. This is unfortunate given the fact that even as successful as some cancer immunotherapy was recently shown to be, it helps only a fraction of patients and cures even a smaller subset of those.