Category: Research

Brianna Lombardi, PhD, MSW, and Erin Fraher, PhD, MPP, served as lead investigators on a major new statewide report assessing the need, supply, and distribution of North Carolina’s mental health and substance use (MH/SU) services workforce. Released by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, the report, State...

A new three‑year evaluation led by the UNC Chatham Hospital Maternity Care Center (MCC) team shows that reopening a rural Level I maternity unit can provide safe, high‑quality birth outcomes, significantly reduce travel burdens for families, and offer a strong family physician and midwife‑led model for rural maternity care. Patient...

Nadja Vielot, PhD, an epidemiologist in the UNC Department of Family Medicine, is lead author of a newly published study in Annals of Internal Medicine that provides real-world evidence for the effectiveness of the recombinant zoster vaccine (RZV) in older adults. The research team conducted a target trial emulation using...

A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill clinical trial found that graphic health warnings on little cigars and cigarillos significantly increase users’ intentions to quit and promote behaviors linked to tobacco cessation. These findings could provide the cigar-specific evidence the FDA previously lacked in efforts to require cigar warnings....

Dr. Ryan Paulus has been awarded a $75,000 American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) Residency Learning Network Grant to establish a national POCUS Research Collaborative focused on advancing point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) in family medicine. The collaborative aims to evaluate how POCUS can improve diagnostic accuracy, enhance clinical decision-making, and support...

A qualitative study published in BMC Public Health, conducted by lead author Chineme Enyioha, MD, MPH, and colleagues, aimed to design effective communication strategies to support health warning labels (HWLs) on little cigars and cigarillos (LCCs), a tobacco product increasingly popular among young adults, particularly within Black communities. With nearly 9...

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Department of Family Medicine, including Professor Leah Ranney, PhD, MA, Assistant Professor Sarah D. Kowitt, PhD, MPH, and authors Sonia A. Clark, MHA, and Kristen L. Jarman, MSPH, have published a pivotal study in a special issue of the American...

UNC Family Medicine faculty Leah Ranney, PhD, Sarah Kowitt, PhD, MPH, and team were recently rewarded a five-year, $2.9 million grant studying cannabis warnings. The award from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) will go towards research involving a legal analysis of existing cannabis warning regulations, interviews with...

Stark disparities remain in who uses tobacco products and their resulting health outcomes. The University of North Carolina has received a competitive, five-year grant from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Food and Drug Administration to be one of seven Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science nationwide. UNC’s...

Brianna Lombardi, Ph.D., MSW, and Family Medicine colleagues are recipients of a recently awarded $4.5 million five-year HRSA grant to form a new Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center (BHWRC) at UNC. Lombardi is the Primary Investigator and the Director of the BHWRC, which will function as a sister center to...

Adam Goldstein, MD, MPH, traveled to the White House on June 1 for the Cancer Moonshot Smoking Cessation Forum. The meeting highlighted the Biden Administration’s commitment to tackling the single biggest driver of cancer deaths in this country—smoking—and efforts underway across sectors to equitably expand access to effective smoking cessation...

UNC Department of Family Medicine (DFM) is interested in supporting the growth of the department’s behavioral health research through this special call for applications. Projects funded under this call will facilitate future successful grant proposals focused on behavioral health. This call uses the same submission and review mechanism as the...

Chineme Enyioha, MD, MPH, assistant professor in the UNC Department of Family Medicine, was recently awarded a K23 Career Development Award from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for a study entitled, “Development of a prototype for a mobile health intervention for smoking cessation with features culturally adapted...

Sarah Kowitt, PhD, MPH, assistant professor in the UNC Department of Family Medicine, was recently awarded a five-year, $762,196 grant by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award (K01 grant) focuses on tobacco regulatory research in youth, specifically on...