Award
Recipients
Open Positions
Webinars & Workshops
Award
Opportunies
Caregiving During Crisis
The Emory University team has designed a fully online “Caregiving During Crisis” course to help informal caregivers of persons living with dementia to adapt to caregiving during the COVID-19 pandemic. The course focuses on three main topics: keeping you and your person safe, navigating the healthcare system, and managing home life with dementia. If you are caring for a person living with dementia, if you have a way to access the course online, and if you’d like more information about or want to see if you are eligible for the course, please email: caregiving.crisis@emory.edu
Award Recipients
Gerontological Society of America Inaugural
Barbara Berkman Award
The Gerontological Society of America announced on July 2nd 2021, that Susan Lane Hughes, PhD, Director of the UIC Center for Research on Health and Aging, Principal Investigator of the Midwest Roybal Center for Health Promotion and Translation, and designer of the Fit & Strong! program for persons with arthritis has been designated the inaugural winner of the Barbara Berkman Award for Excellence in interdisciplinary research with older adults. This new award that will be bestowed by the Social Research, Policy and Practice Section of the Society at its Annual Meeting on Friday November 12, 2021, in Phoenix AZ. The Award recognizes lifetime contributions to outstanding interdisciplinary research in aging. Under Dr. Hughes’ leadership the UIC Center for Research on Health and Aging has grown to encompass 35 faculty, representing 8 colleges and 18 departments across UIC. Her Roybal Center has been renewed by NIH consecutively for five continuous cycles and has provided more than $2.65 million in pilot funding to early-stage investigators from multiple disciplines who are now tenured faculty with distinguished careers in aging research. This investment has leveraged $128.8 million in research funding in aging at UIC. Finally, Dr. Hughes’ Fit & Strong! program was developed by an interdisciplinary team, has received numerous national awards, served more than 10,000 older adults, and is being provided in 32 states at present.
NIA COVID-19 Supplement Recipients
Principal Investigators: Sarah Berry, MD, MPH, Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew Senior Life; Vince Mor, PhD, Brown University School of Public Health
Drs. Berry and Mor were awarded a supplement to improve COVID-19 testing for underserved and vulnerable populations as part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative, the RADx Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) program. This initiative will leverage the foundation of the IMPACT Collaboratory to establish IMPACT-COVID-19 (IMPACT-C), a collaborative dedicated to developing and evaluating SARS-CoV-2 testing strategies in highly vulnerable residents and health care workers of skilled nursing facilities. IMPACT-C will assemble the organizational, administrative, and expertise components necessary to swiftly conduct a rigorous vaccine trial, when available.
Principal Investigator: Ellen McCreedy, PhD, MPH, Brown University School of Public Health
Dr. McCreedy and her team will conduct a cluster randomized embedded pragmatic clinical trial (ePCT) by leveraging electronic health records of Bluestone Physician Services to test the effectiveness of a COVID-specific, advance care planning (ACP) intervention on documentation of care preferences among assisted living community (ALC) residents with AD/ADRD from 150 ALCs in 3 states.
Principal Investigator: Lewis Lipsitz, MD, Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew SeniorLife
Dr. Lipsitz and his team will evaluate the efficacy of a Massachusetts state-funded strategy to minimize the spread of COVID-19 among older adults and their care providers within Massachusetts NHs using multiple data sources. Efficacy will be measured over the 2-month intervention period among all residents in nursing homes (NHs) across Massachusetts compared to those in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
Principal Investigator: Joshua Chodosh, MD, MSHS, NYU Langone Health
Dr. Chodosh and his team will design and pilot test an intervention that leverages the COVID-19 antibody and PCR status of residents and staff to inform staff-residents care assignments to minimize COVID-19 transmission rates. The team will conduct the study in two New York City facilities with high minority and AD/ADRD representation and compare intervention units using this strategy with those that do not.
Open Positions
Webinars & Workshops
Research on Interventions that Promote the Careers of Individuals in the Biomedical Research Enterprise
Tuesday, July 20
1:00-2:15pm EST
The program supports studies on interventions aimed to enhance research-oriented individuals’ interest, motivation, persistence, and preparedness for careers in the biomedical research workforce. The new FOA has a significant change, which is that it will no longer accept applications that seek support for research designed solely to inform interventions. Investigators seeking support for research solely to inform interventions and advance the scientific basis of innovation policy in the biomedical sciences, are encouraged to consider the program Science of Science Policy Approach to Analyzing and Innovating the Biomedical Research Enterprise (SCISIPBIO) as an alternative.
Messaging Medicine: Communicating Your Research to Colleagues, Policymakers, and the Public
Thursday, July 22
11 am - 12 pm EST
Louise Aronson, MD, MFA
Professor of Medicine
University of California San Francisco Division of Geriatrics
Dr. Louise Aronson will be teaching on the power of storytelling and expertise in weaving a narrative in research, and how to convey the significance and meaning of the complex and heterogenous issues in the study of multiple chronic conditions when presenting to wider audiences.
The presentation recordings and slides are now available from the RCCN Virtual Workshop Inclusion of Older Adults in Clinical Research!
The meeting included sessions on aspects of including older adults in clinical research including the Current Situation, Barriers - Real and Perceived, Making the Case, and Best Practices for Reaching Out to Colleagues
Selected presentation recordings from the workshop:
Award Opportunities
Two Supplement Awards to IMPACT Collaboratory Will Link Big Data and the Impact of COVID-19 on People Living with Dementia
The NIA IMPACT Collaboratory has been awarded two COVID-19 Supplements partnering with major retail pharmacies to create a massive monitoring system of the long-term safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination on people with AD/ADRD.
These two studies are:
Monitoring Medicare Beneficiaries' Response to COVID vaccines (CVS Project)
This project established an active post-vaccination surveillance system of a large population to track and report safety and outcomes related to SARS-CoV-2 vaccine(s). Working jointly with CVS Health and the Medicare & Medicaid Resource Information Center (MedRIC) at Acumen, LLC, the project established a data infrastructure to monitor the effects of COVID-19 vaccines administered to Medicare beneficiaries by CVS across the country. Data transfers from the national retail pharmacy chain are merged with Medicare data. The resulting data base is analyzed to identify demographic, race/ethnicity, clinical (e.g., ADRD), and health care system factors associated with being vaccinated, estimate the rate of adverse events attributable to the vaccine and estimate breakthrough COVID illness among vaccinated Medicare beneficiaries. This program provides the basis for assessing mid- to long-term safety and efficacy of the different vaccines being distributed for use in the elderly population in the country.
Medicare Match for post-vaccination monitoring (Walgreens)
This project builds on the researchers’ partnership with CVS to establish a data infrastructure to monitor the effects of COVID-19 vaccines administered to Medicare beneficiaries by CVS across the country. The goal of this project is to add data from Walgreen’s 13,231,175 million Medicare beneficiary pharmacy customers to the existing infrastructure which will increase the research team’s capacity to track immediate and long term effects of vaccination on nearly half the population of Medicare beneficiaries.
The need for a larger study population is particularly important because those with ADRD already suffering from neurodegenerative diseases may be at greater risk of serious neurological adverse events of vaccines. In addition, the unknown potential for adverse events may result in high rates of incomplete vaccination (both shots) among older adults. Such uncertainty contributes to vaccine hesitancy and may result in large disparities in SARS-CoV-2 vaccination among racial/ethnic groups, for which disparities in seasonal influenza vaccination already exist.
To learn more about these studies, visit this page on Building Infrastructure Supplement Awards, and the press release from Brown University at this link.
Notice of Intent (NOI) to Publish a New Funding Opportunity Announcement for Upcoming IMPACT Pilot Grants
RFA Release | August 16, 2021
Letter of Intent due | September 17, 2021
IMPACT funds several one-year awards of pilot pragmatic clinical trials (ePCTs) that test non-pharmacological interventions embedded in health care system(s) for people living with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-related dementias (ADRD) and their care partners. Under this mechanism, interventions must be linked to the needs of a health care system. More information on the IMPACT Pilot Grants Program can be found here.
The goal of the pilot projects is to generate the preliminary data necessary to design and conduct a future full-scale Stage IV effectiveness ePCT (based on the NIH Stage Model). The IMPACT Collaboratory will give preference to applications that address dementia care for populations traditionally marginalized or underrepresented in clinical trials and those that promote health equity. It is anticipated that Pilot Projects will be funded for up to $175,000 in direct costs for a maximum of 12-months.
Stay tuned for updates regarding the release of the RFA, an informational webinar and application deadline. If you have questions related to this funding opportunity, please contact IMPACTcollaboratory@hsl.harvard.edu. The IMPACT Collaboratory will share additional details as they become available on the website at www.IMPACTcollaboratory.org.
Recruitment for National Library of Medicine Intramural Research Program Scientific Director
Applications should be sent to: NLM SD Search Committee, c/o Troy Pfister at - NLMSD@nih.gov for the first review of applications by COB, Wednesday, September 15, 2021. The position will remain open until a selection is made.
NLM’s Intramural Research Program (IRP) is recruiting for its Scientific Director. The position of NLM Scientific Director offers an exciting opportunity for a creative, forward-thinking individual to develop a comprehensive vision for NLM’s IRP and direct the implementation of that vision. The recruitment opened today on the Executive Careers at NIH page and will remain open until a selection is made. The position is listed as NLM Scientific Director.
NLM is embarking on a bold new direction for its IRP, unifying its strong programs in computational biology and computational health sciences into a single program and expanding its role in advanced computation, analytics, and visualization to accelerate discovery from biological and clinical data. NLM’s IRP researchers develop innovative approaches, methods and strategies that are unbiased, accessible, and reusable across domains. Research supported by NLM may be motivated by specific health conditions or biological problems, including those of interest to other NIH programs, and by national goals for developing intelligent computational tools to analyze and understand all types of biomedical, biological, and public health data.
The successful candidate will direct the activities of a diverse group of research investigators and trainees. In addition to having responsibility for the budget, staffing, quality, and integrity of NLM’s IRP, the Scientific Director is an active participant in the NIH Intramural Research Program, representing NLM at the Scientific Director’s meetings, IRP committees, and in other groups within and external to NIH. The incumbent is the executive secretary of the NLM Board of Scientific Counselors and a member of the NLM Leadership team that advises the NLM Director.