FAME Grant Program

The Department of Medicine FAME (Fostering the Academic Mission in the Emory DOM) grant program is designed to provide support for clinical faculty to dedicate up to 20 percent of their professional time to scholarly activity including research, education, mentoring, and quality improvement projects.

This was the largest FAME grant funding year in the history of the program! In addition to DOM funding, three grant recipients were funded by Cardiology, one recipient was funded by Infectious Diseases, and one recipient was funded by the Emory Health Services Research Center (HSR). The DOM would like to extend special thanks to Jim Hills, a philanthropic Cardiology patient who supported awardee Neal Bhatia's FAME project. 

Please join us in congratulating the awardees!

Application information for the 2022 FAME grant will be available soon. 

Neal Bhatia, MD

Assistant Professor, Division of Cardiology

Project title: "A pilot study to evaluate deep learning approaches for prediction of ventricular arrhythmias using upstream electrograms from intracardiac devices"

(Supported by a Cardiology funded grant from Jim Hills)  

Bhatia's project aims to leverage the vast amount of data in patients with intracardiac devices and digitize them for analysis. He hopes to identify novel digital signatures within electrical signals prior to defibrillator shocks using deep learning methods.

Kunal Bhatt, MD

Assistant Professor, Division of Cardiology

Project title: "Improving care for patients with hereditary transthyretin cardiac amyloidosis: An urgent health equity issue"

(Supported by an HSR funded grant)

Bhatt's project will establish a clinical and research database to better characterize a growing cohort of patients. It will also implement specific clinical interventions aimed at improving rates of screening, diagnosis, and treatment of hereditary transthyretin cardiac amyloidosis patients within the Emory system.

Danny Eapen, MD

Assistant Professor, Division of Cardiology

Project title: “Chasing cholesterol: Investigating the utility of a machine learning algorithmic approach to flag, identify, network and deliver patients with familial hypercholesterolemia within the Emory Healthcare System"

(Supported by a Cardiology funded grant)

Eapen's project aims to apply a validated machine learning algorithm (MLA) to the EEMR system to identify vulnerable individuals and engage with them for clinical screening, initiation, and optimization of therapy.

Soroosh Kiani, MD

Assistant Professor, Division of Cardiology

Project title: "Examining the overlapping syndromes of frailty and congestive heart failure in older patients undergoing cardiac resynchronization therapy"

(Supported by a Cardiology funded grant)

Kiani's project seeks to leverage the cardiac-specific nature of CRT therapy to tease out the overlapping manifestations of frailty and congestive heart failure. The study will also examine the role of frailty in effecting outcomes after cardiac procedures in patients with heart failure.

Jason Linefsky, MD

Associate Professor, Division of Cardiology

Project title: "Temporal trends in the incidence and prognosis of aortic stenosis: A nationwide longitudinal cohort study of US veterans"

(Supported by a DOM funded grant) 

Linefsky's project seeks to develop an epidemiologic database of US Veterans with aortic stenosis using the VA electronic health record. The study will attempt to overcome previous limitations of epidemiologic cohort studies on aortic stenosis.

Marcos Coutinho Schechter, MD

Assistant Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases

Project title: "Mobile clinics and patient navigation to prevent diabetes-related amputations: a Grady Health System feasibility study"

(Supported by an Infectious Diseases funded grant)

Schechter's project aims to assess the impact of mobile clinics and patient navigators, singly or together, on post-hospital discharge diabetic foot ulcer care at Grady. This study will generate key data to seek external funding for a clinical trial of mobile clinics and patient navigation for diabetic foot ulcer care.

Kristine Vanijcharoenkarn, MD

Assistant Professor, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine

Project title: “Strategies of COVID-19 vaccine administration in patients with first-dose adverse reactions or history of severe allergic reaction” 

(Supported by a DOM funded grant)