News and Highlights
May 2012
New Grants
Laith Abu-Raddad, PhD, Associate Professor of Public Health/Qatar, is the Principal Investigator on a new 3-year grant from the Qatar National Research Fund titled “Characterizing the HIV/AIDS epidemics in the Middle East and North Africa: Systematic reviews and quantitative assessment.” (2012-2015, $897,624) This grant is enabling him to continue the research that he started more than 8 years ago while he was still in the U.S.
Dr. Lawrence Casalino Is PI on New Grants from Commonwealth Fund and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Lawrence P. Casalino, MD, PhD, the Livingston Farrand Associate Professor of Public Health and Chief of the Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research, is the Principal Investigator on a grant from the Commonwealth Fund titled “Exploring How Small Physician Practices Can Achieve Higher-Quality, Lower-Cost Care.” This grant runs from 2011 to 2013.
Dr. Casalino is also the Principal Investigator on a grant from the Commonwealth Fund titled “Transforming the Primary Care Team Workday” This grant runs from 2011 to 2012.
Dr. Casalino was also awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation entitled “Physician Practice Communities,” on which he is collaborating with Andrew M. Ryan, PhD, MA, Assistant Professor and the Walsh McDermott Scholar of Public Health in the Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness, and with investigators from the University of Michigan and Duke University. The core hypotheses of this project are that physician networks can have a large impact on the quality and cost of medical care, and that high quality and/or low cost networks differ in key characteristics.
Jennifer Epstein, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Division of Prevention and Health Behavior, in conjunction with Dr. Charles Hughes, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, has been awarded $500,000 from the National Science Foundation for their study, “Reducing Alcohol Use Among College Students Using Virtual Role Playing.” The project’s main objective is to devise a means to meet the challenge of excessive alcohol use by college students. During a developmental phase, virtual reality scenes involving alcohol will be devised. A preliminary secondary prevention trial will then test the hypothesis that adding the opportunity for role play to a required web-based online alcohol prevention program will improve results compared to the web-based program only. Read the medical college press release.
Judith M. Fontana, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Community and Public Health Programs, was awarded a fellowship from the Stony Wold-Herbert Foundation for the 2012-2013 year. The fellowship will support additional training for Dr. Fontana in the field of respiratory disease. Dr. Fontana works in the lab of Mirella Salvatore, MD, Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medicine, who is the sponsor and mentor for Dr. Fontana’s fellowship.
Dr. Fontana has also been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellow travel grant to attend the 2012 American Society for Virology (ASV) 31st Annual Meeting hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the Monona Terrace Convention Center, July 21-25th. This grant is provided by the National Institutes of Health via the ASV.
Linda M. Gerber, PhD, Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology in Medicine, and Matthew J. Press, MD, MSc, Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medicine and the Nanette Laitman Clinical Scholar in Public Health/Quality of Care Research, are Co-Principal Investigators, and Lawrence P. Casalino, MD, PhD, is a Co-Investigator, on a grant from the Aetna Foundation titled “Hospital Readmission and Communication between Home Health Nurses and Physicians.” The researchers will examine communication between home health nurses and outpatient physicians and assess its association with hospital readmission . Colleagues at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, Penny Feldman, PhD, and Timothy Peng, PhD, are collaborating on this study. Jayme Mendelsohn, MPH, and Xuming Sun, MS, are also working on this project. A description of the study is included in a press release from Aetna .
Sandra Hurtado Rua, PhD, Postdoctoral Associate in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellow travel grant to attend the Sixth International Workshop on Statistical Analysis of Neuronal Data (SAND6) . The workshop will be held May 31-June 2, 2012, at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA.
Rainu Kaushal, MD, MPH, the Frances and John L. Loeb Professor of Medical Informatics and Director of the Center for Healthcare Informatics and Policy, is the Principal Investigator of the “Evaluation of the Healthcare Efficiency and Affordability Law for New Yorkers Capital Grant Program (HEAL NY) – Phase 10,” funded by the New York State Department of Health. Work on this grant project began in January 2012. Erika Abramson, MD, MS, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Public Health, Jessica S. Ancker, MPH, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Health in Pediatrics and Assistant Professor of Public Health, Thomas R. Campion, Jr., PhD, Instructor in Public Health and Instructor of Public Health in Pediatrics, Melissa M. Honour, MPH, Administrative Director of the Center for Healthcare Informatics and Policy, Lisa M. Kern, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Public Health and Medicine,and Joshua E. Richardson, PhD, MLIS, Instructor of Public Health in Pediatrics and Instructor in Public Health, are co-investigators.
Dr. Kaushal is also the Principal Investigator of a project to evaluate the impact of HIT at Denver Health in Colorado. The project is funded by Siemens Corporation. Melissa Honour, Dr. Jessica Ancker and Dr. Thomas Campion are also investigators.
Dr. Kaushal is also the Principal Investigator of a Training Agreement with Excellus Health Plan Inc.
Ravinder Mamtani, MBBS, MD, MSc, Professor of Public Health/Qatar, is the Co-PI on two new 3-year grants from the Qatar Foundation for obesity research. The first is titled “Obesity in the Qatari Population: Public Health and Genomic/Proteomic Perspectives.” The second is “Nanotechnologies and Treatment of Obesity: From Polymeric Nanoparticle-Based Recruitment of Adipose Stem Cells Toward Autologous Cell-Based Therapy.”
Pablo Rodríguez del Pozo, MD, PhD, JD, Associate Professor of Public Health/Qatar, and Ziyad Mahfoud, PhD, Associate Professor of Public Health/Qatar, are Principal Investigators for a new project, “Finding Alternatives to Obtaining Patient Informed Consent in Qatar: A Pilot Study.” The project, funded by WCMC/Q, is aimed at producing preliminary data on exploring culturally appropriate ways to obtain valid, fully informed consent from patients and from potential research subjects in Qatar. The pilot will consist of a couple of focus group sessions from which themes and topics will be picked up to design a small survey. Dr. Ismail Helmy from Hamad is a co-investigator. The project includes the participation of four students.
Mirella Salvatore, MD, Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medicine, was awarded a grant from the Feldstein Medical Foundation for her project titled "Targeted Vector Delivery for Rapid Protection from Infectious Diseases." It will run from June 1, 2012-May 30, 2013. The study will develop and test a novel passive immunotherapy approach using integrase-defective lentiviral vectors (ID-LV) that produce therapeutic antibodies, using influenza virus as a model. This study, in conjunction with the investigator’s previous studies, will advance the field of passive immunotherapy and hold excellent promise to be rapidly “translated” to patient populations.
Bruce Schackman, PhD, Associate Professor of Public Health and Chief of the Division of Health Policy, Yuhua Bao, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Division of Health Policy, and Huibo Shao, MS, MA, Research Biostatistician in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, conducted a quality improvement evaluation for NewYork-Presbyterian Select Health. The objective of the project was to classify and identify characteristics of Select Health’s members who incur high medical costs in the early period after enrollment.
Art Sedrakyan, MD, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of the Comparative Effectiveness Research Program in the Department of Public Health, is the Principal Investigator for a Major Federal Contract Awarded to Weill Cornell Medical College by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to establish the Medical Device Epidemiology Network (MDEpiNet) Science and Infrastructure Center. The Center will receive substantial funding to help develop a national roadmap for Unique Device Identification (UDI) implementation and to support the International Consortium of Orthopedic Registries (ICOR). Both initiatives will assist the FDA in advancing the regulatory science and building national and international device registries to improve medical device safety and effectiveness in the United States. The center's research will focus on investigating the safety and effectiveness of implantable medical devices using patient outcome data contained in registries and electronic data sources. The research will also help to create a road map for incorporating the device information in electronic medical records systems to enable data analysis on medical devices at the macro level. Using this data, researchers will be able to scrutinize new medical devices during the research and development stage to determine if they will be safe and effective in real world settings. Dr. Sedrakyan is co-leading the ICOR project with Dr. Elizabeth Paxton from Kaiser Permanente, a major partner on the contract.
