Last year, the College of Public Health and Health Professions launched a new funding mechanism to help faculty members advance their research. The PHHP Research Innovation Fund is designed to fund pilot testing or feasibility studies that place faculty members, particularly early career researchers, in an optimal position to obtain funding from outside agencies.
Unlike many other grant programs that may take months, or even a year, to respond with application decisions, the PHHP Research Innovation Fund makes decisions and provides funds within four weeks of submission. Awards of up to $25,000 are supported, in part, by the Robert G. Frank Endowed Professorship.
A year into the program, the college has awarded Research Innovation Fund grants to faculty pursuing a wide range of research topics, such as tinnitus in patients with long COVID; bone health in children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy; health concerns for women with HIV; low and non-alcoholic beverages as a harm reduction strategy; the physiology of muscle change in illness; and self-monitoring for weight loss.
Young-Rock Hong, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of health services research, management and policy, received a grant to develop a dataset for studies of bariatric weight loss surgery and health outcomes. Using OneFlorida electronic health records data, Hong has established a cohort comprising records of two million patients with obesity, which will serve as the foundation for investigations into the effectiveness of various obesity treatments.
“We are grateful for the research grant support that has enabled this work,” Hong said. “Preliminary findings from this project have significant promise for our future projects addressing the burden of obesity and enhancing treatment options.”
Yiyang Liu, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in the department of epidemiology, used her Research Innovation Fund grant to create algorithms to extract key HIV risk predictors from electronic health records data, establish new collaborations and provide student research experiences. She leveraged these activities to successfully compete for a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to develop a model that can detect women with a higher risk of HIV and translate that information into a clinical decision support platform.
“This is a major step toward overcoming the gaps in existing HIV risk prediction algorithms and helping providers identify women for HIV testing and pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP,” Liu said.
