The Center for Health Innovation is excited to announce the winners of the 2021 Innovation Pilot Award! Click to learn more about the three projects that were selected this year.
The UNC Radiology Image Analysis Group, led by Dr. Pew-Thian Yap, has successfully found that deep learning can be used to identify poor-quality images in milliseconds. Their study hopes to increase timely decision-making with MRI re-scans.
Dr. Nicole Short, assistant professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, was awarded the Sleep Innovation Research Grant by the Departments of Allied Health Sciences Office of Research and Scholarship and Neurology. Dr. Short will investigate the intersection of poor sleep and exposure to trauma among women. Her study may support future sleep interventions in order … Read more
Dr. Li Qian has received the Emerging Investigator Award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the NIH. The award includes $6.5M in funding over 7 years to support the Qian Lab, which is focused on developing and refining reprogramming approaches to repair injured hearts.
The “Food is Medicine” research partnership led by Dr. Seth Berkowitz is awarded a $3.25M grant by the National Institutes of Health. This second grant will support further research of medically tailored meal programs and investigate how addressing food insecurity impacts diabetes management for people with HIV.
Dr. Greg Scherrer, associate professor in the UNC Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, was selected for the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. The Scherrer lab will generate a brain-wide map of pain emotional circuits in addition to separating out activated brain cells and sequencing their genetic code, with the goal of finding better ways … Read more
Dr. Jennifer Elston Lafata was awarded $750K by Genentech to study how virtual care programs in cancer are considering equity and disparity issues. The goal of this research is to consider how virtual cancer care can improve quality and patient outcomes while reducing current health disparities. This research will be completed in partnership with the … Read more
Dr. Katarzyna Kedziora, postdoctoral researcher in the UNC SOM Department of Genetics, was awarded a $740K Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Grant. Dr.Kedziora’s work will provide the imaging community with better access to improve data and metadata handling, the sharing of imaging datasets, and data quality control and reproducibility through machine and deep learning approaches.
Dr. Jonathan Schisler, assistant professor of pharmacology and pathology & laboratory medicine at the UNC School of Medicine is a co-senior author of this study focused on determining the driver of cellular damage during space travel. Mitochondria defects are found to explain a series of health issues observed in astronauts who spent extended time in … Read more
Providers at UNC Medical Center and the UNC SOM will train the U.S. Army’s Forward Resuscitation Surgical Teams and other medical personnel from Fort Bragg, NC. Military personnel will have the opportunity to gain real-world experience in UNC Medical Center’s emergency department, ICU and operating rooms.