Category: feature

The UNC Center for Health Innovation is pleased to announce the winners of the eleventh annual Innovation Pilot Awards. Proposals were sought from across UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine faculty and employees for innovations across a spectrum of areas including care delivery, new technology, advanced analytics, and more.

FORTUNE has named UNC Health one of “America’s Most Innovative Companies” in its inaugural release of its Most Innovative list shining a spotlight on the top companies in the U.S. that have made the biggest impact in innovation.

UNC School of Medicine researchers Jack Griffith, PhD, and Taghreed Al-Turki, PhD, found that telomeres at the tips of chromosomes contain sufficient genetic information to produce two small proteins with potentially potent biological properties.

A research team led by William Polacheck, PhD, at the UNC School of Medicine, has engineered a microfluidic model that mimics a rare genetic disorder affecting the structure of veins, arteries, capillaries, and lymphatic vessels.

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...

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...

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...