Research News and Highlights

Researchers in Emory University’s School of Medicine and Georgia State University’s School of Public Health have received a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to help nursing homes implement practices to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Ted Johnson, MD, MPH, and Miranda Moore, PhD, are leading the training for 564 staff at 187 Georgia nursing homes. 

Megha Shah, MD, MSc received official notice that her K23 award was funded. This is a 5-year career development grant funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Disparities that protects 75% of Dr. Shah's time to develop her research program.  The goal of the K23 proposal is to provide necessary training in cultural adaptation, implementation science, and social network analysis to determine whether a social network-focused lifestyle intervention, based in a primary care setting, is feasible and acceptable for immigrant men from South Asia and West Africa and whether health behaviors will improve among participants’ social networks. The proposed work aims to develop a community-informed program, based on evidence-based lifestyle programs, adapted for the specific needs for immigrant men and to understand the diffusion of health behaviors among participants’ social networks, a potentially untapped resource for lifestyle behavior change.

The scientific and clinical importance of training spiritual health chaplains/clinicians in the delivery of compassion-focused, evidence-based care has received recent recognition from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the form of a new five year K01 career development award to Jennifer Mascaro, PhD.  The new K01 career award is the first such award from the NIH, given to specifically study chaplain-delivered compassion interventions in a hospital setting. In particular, the K01 award will support Dr. Mascaro’s training in integrative oncology research methods and implementation science, which will allow her to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a chaplain-delivered CBCT® (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training) meditation derived program for patients receiving hematopoietic stem cell transplant for cancer.

Ambar Kulshreshtha, MD, MPH, PhD has received funding for his K23 proposal, "Mechanistic Pathways Linking Stress and Cognition," which extends his prior research work in cardiovascular diseases for the prevention of Alzheimer's disease and the reduction of health disparities. This funding will expand opportunities for Dr. Kulshreshtha to continue working with his mentoring team and multidisciplinary collaborators in Geriatrics, Psychology, Epidemiology, Cardiology and Neurology. His long term research goal is to investigate the mechanisms by which cardiovascular and psychosocial risk factors affect cognition and to develop novel interventions that improve cognitive reserve and reduce health disparities.

Emory researchers received a three-year, $3.1 million grant from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to conduct a five-site, international clinical trial of specialty palliative care for adults with cystic fibrosis. Dio Kavalieratos, PhD, associate professor and director of research and quality in Emory’s Division of Palliative Medicine, is the lead investigator of the first-of-its-kind trial, which hopes to enroll 264 adults with cystic fibrosis and their caregivers. The study is the first trial of specialty palliative care in CF, and could lead to important changes regarding the standard of care received by people with CF.