Four Department of Medicine faculty members’ proposals selected for Synergy Awards

The Woodruff Health Sciences Center has announced the 10 proposals selected for funding in the fifth round of Synergy Awards, which support collaborative projects among faculty across the health sciences. Four Department of Medicine faculty members, Faisal M. Merchant, MD; Neal Dickert, Jr., PhD; Timothy D. Read, PhD; and Jennifer Christie, MD, served as investigators on three selected proposals.

Proposals for the Synergy Awards are required to include faculty members with primary appointments in at least two different schools/units as co-principal investigators. The awards are intended to support new, highly innovative projects that are not yet funded or published.

Funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President for Health Affairs, with support from the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center Fund, Inc., these awards offer up to $100,000 in support for an award term of one year, with potential carryover to a second year.

Since the Synergy Awards were initiated in 2016, more than $3.2 million in funds have been awarded to more than 90 researchers throughout the health sciences, supporting 34 proposals.

Please join us in congratulating the 10 selected proposals and their investigators in the fifth round of Synergy Awards:

Clinical and ocular fluid analysis in the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) Network (Sierra Leone)
Steven Yeh, MD (Medicine)
Jessica G. Shantha, MD (Medicine)
Robert F. Breiman, MD (Public Health, Global Health Institute)

Developing cell-free DNA-based net-generation biomarkers for neurodegenerative disorders
Peng Jin, PhD (Medicine)
Hao Wu, PhD (Public Health)

Evaluating the impact of decision aid timing on mandatory shared decision making for defibrillator implantation
Faisal M. Merchant, MD (Medicine) – Division of Cardiology
Neal Dickert, Jr., MD, PhD (Medicine) – Division of Cardiology
David H. Howard, PhD (Public Health)

Fast diffusion Kurtosis imaging of acute stroke patients
Ranliang Hu, MD (Medicine)
Phillip Z. Sun, PhD (Yerkes)

Gut microbiome, cancer immunotherapy, and kidney cancer outcomes
Veronika Fedirko, MPH, PhD (Public Health)
Mehmet A. Bilen, MD (Medicine)
Viraj Master, MD, PhD, FACS (Medicine)
Haydn T. Kissick, PhD (Medicine)
Yijuan Hu, PhD (Public Health)
Timothy D. Read, PhD (Medicine) – Division of Infectious Diseases

Multilevel determinants of sleep and 24-hour blood pressure among African Americans
Dayna A. Johnson, PhD, MPH (Public Health)
Donald Bliwise, PhD (Medicine)
Tene T. Lewis, PhD (Public Health)

Nutritional immunoregulation protection against pneumococcal pneumonia
Christopher N. LaRock, PhD (Medicine)
Jorge E. Vidal, PhD (Public Health)

Shiftwork, functional bowel symptoms, and the microbiome
Ann E. Rogers (Nursing)
Timothy D. Read, PhD (Medicine) – Division of Infectious Diseases
Jennifer Christie, MD (Medicine) – Division of Digestive Diseases

Transplant rejection diagnosis and classification using machine learning on whole-slide imaging in pediatric and adult kidney transplant recipients
Julien Hogan, MD, PhD (Medicine)
David Benkeser, PhD, MPH (Public Health)
Lee Cooper, PhD (Medicine)

Unravelling the electrophysiologic effects of diabetes with novel risk prediction tools: A global collaborative study in South Asians
Amit Shah, MD, MSCR (Public Health)
K. M. Venkat Narayan, MD, MSc, MBA (Public Health)
Gari D. Clifford, DPhil (Medicine)