In this issue of The TRIbune, we feature the achievements of researchers who participated in our Strategies for Training and Advancing underrepresented Researchers (STARs) program in fall 2021. Participants described the program as “invaluable” and “fantastic” and have since secured career development awards, supplemental grants and internal funding. In addition:

We highlight Britni Ayers, Ph.D., a former TRI KL2 scholar, who received a $420,750 NIH grant for her research involving pregnant Marshallese women.

We introduce the four community groups selected to TRI’s Community Partners Educated as Arkansas Research Leaders (CPEARL) Program.

And our TRI Study of the Month features Kyle Kalkwarf, M.D., a TRI Implementation Science Scholars Program awardee, for his leadership on a clinical trial involving traumatic brain injury patients.

Read The TRIbune.

The UAMS Office of Institutional Compliance recognizes Corporate Compliance and Ethics Week each year during the first week of November. 

This year, Tracy Thurman, B.S., CCRP, clinical research finance manager for the UAMS Translational Research Institute (TRI), is UAMS’ Clinical Billing Compliance Champion. She was selected for going above and beyond in her adherence to compliance and maintaining positive, supportive relationships with compliance office employees and other members of Team UAMS.

Below is the narrative submitted with her nomination:

“Tracy Thurman is the Clinical Research Finance Manager in TRI. Tracy and the TRI team provide vital services for clinical research areas, such as Medicare Coverage Analysis, building budgets, negotiating budgets with sponsors, and reviewing billing charges for clinical research studies out of TRI.

Tracy has an invaluable depth of knowledge in her field and always strives to help ensure that billing for clinical research studies is set up to ensure compliance. Tracy and her fellow team members work with many areas on campus such as the UAMS Billing Offices, the Value Analysis Office and the UAMS Compliance Office.

Tracy is well respected by her peers. She is always kind, professional and respectful. She is one of the many employees in TRI who help to foster compliance in clinical research that allows UAMS to continue to offer ground-breaking clinical research opportunities for our community. UAMS is very fortunate to have Tracy on TEAM UAMS!”

As part of this awareness, recognition, and reinforcement campaign, each division within Compliance selected Team UAMS members who demonstrate outstanding support to UAMS compliance programs.

Read more here about other 2022 Compliance Champions.

A University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) research team in Northwest Arkansas will study a potential way to improve health outcomes of pregnant Marshallese women using group-based care and health care navigators.

Led by former UAMS Translational Research Institute KL2 Scholar Britni Ayers, Ph.D., the study of maternal health care involving small groups of women, known as CenteringPregnancy, is funded by a two-year, $420,750 grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Pacific Islanders/Marshallese living in the United States have almost twice the infant mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites. Arkansas is home to the country’s largest population of Marshallese, about 14,000 residents.

Ayers’ preliminary research has found that 15% of Marshallese women in Arkansas received no prenatal care (compared to 1.6% women nationally); more than 50% do not attend the recommended number of prenatal care visits; 19% of Marshallese infants were born preterm (compared to 9.6% nationally); and 15% of Marshallese infants were low birthweight (compared to 8.3% nationally).

Marshallese women face a number of barriers to medical care, including language, transportation and lack of information to help navigate the medical system and access resources.

“They are fearful of the medical system,” said Ayers, an assistant professor at UAMS Office of Community Health & Research in Springdale. “It’s ubiquitious — Marshellese women have expressed fear of the prenatal care process in all of our focus group interviews.”

Ayers hopes her CenteringPregnancy research will show that it is effective and can be used on a larger scale.

“Pregnant Marshallese women in Arkansas are experiencing urgent health needs, and we have the potential to move the needle tremendously with this type of concept,” she said.

CenteringPregnancy programs have proved effective in other areas of the United States, but it has not been tried with Pacific Islanders/Marshallese women. It should be a good fit for the population, Ayers said.

“The Marshallese culture is collectivist. They value the group more than the individual, so I think any sort of group health care will be a better way to reach this population,” she said.

Ayers will recruit 40 Marshallese women to take part in 90-minute small-group sessions. The sessions will include a bilingual CenteringPregnancy-trained Marshallese registered nurse and other prenatal health professionals providing brief one-on-one examinations and leading discussion of pregnancy topics at each of the 10 prenatal sessions. Additionally, all participants will be provided a bilingual Marshallese care navigator to aid in assessment and enrollment in social support services.

Over the last two years, Ayers used research pilot funding and training from a UAMS Translational Research Institute KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award to help secure the NIH grant.

The Translational Research Institute is supported by a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, grant UL1 TR003107.

In this issue of The TRIbune, we feature an exciting new software program that will simplify TRI grant application processes for researchers, reviewers and our staff. The Apply software program will be available in spring 2023 for six TRI funding opportunities. The program will provide a tool that not only streamlines processes but also ensures that TRI’s funding programs are equitable, fair and transparent.

We also highlight our latest cohort of Strategies for Training and Advancing underrepresented Researchers (STARs) program recipients and the recent national award for Jennifer Vincenzo, Ph.D., which stems from her work as a KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Program scholar.  

Our Study of the Month features Erika Petersen, M.D., a professor of neurosurgery, and her collaborations with Ranu Jung, Ph.D., at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Institute for Integrative & Innovative Research (I³R), and UAMS orthopaedic surgeons John Bracey Jr., M.D., and Mark Tait, M.D.

Read The TRIbune.

The UAMS Translational Research Institute has named five UAMS researchers who will receive pilot grants of up to $50,000 each for studies that impact rural health.

The one-year awards went to projects led by researchers in the College of Medicine, College of Pharmacy and Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health. They are: 

Stanley K. Ellis, Ed.D., M.S., associate professor, College of Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology; director of Education, Institute for Digital Health & Innovation.

Project: School-Based Tele-counseling Feasibility Pilot

Susan Emmett, M.D., MPH, associate professor, College of Medicine Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, and director of the Center for Hearing Health Equity

Project: Achieving Hearing Health Equity for Rural Children: Optimization of a Novel Mobile Health Tympanometer for Community-Based Hearing Screening

Megan Smith, Pharm.D., BCACP, assistant professor, College of Pharmacy Department of Pharmacy Practice
Project: Evaluation of the Integration of Community Health Workers (CHW) into Rural Community Pharmacies

Michael Thomsen, Ph.D., professor, Governor Sidney S. McMath Chair in Obesity Prevention, director of the Center for the Study of Obesity, Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health

Project: Understanding Rural Disparities in Severe Obesity through the Arkansas Childhood Body Mass Index Panel

Lindsey Wolf, M.D., assistant professor, College of Medicine Department of Surgery, Division of Pediatric Surgery

Project: A Pilot Program to Evaluate the Feasibility of Telemedicine Pediatric Surgical Consultations in Referring Emergency Departments

Research Expo 2022 arrived at a great time for Lisa Jansen, Ph.D., and more than 100 other researchers wanting to learn about and leverage the numerous research resources available at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) and the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System (CAVHS).

“I am a new researcher, so I came to the Expo today to learn about all the options and possibilities that are out there,” said Jansen, who joined UAMS in January as an assistant professor in the College of Health Professions Department of Dietetics and Nutrition. “I love being able to directly ask questions to the representatives of these services. It’s better than just clicking on a website, and they were great at helping me understand how their services can benefit my research.”

Sponsored by the UAMS Translational Research Institute and the Division of Research and Innovation, the Research Expo on Sept. 21 promoted at least 47 research services and resources. The late afternoon event included food, beverages and door prizes.

Translational Research Institute Director Laura James, M.D., told the crowd that the event has grown from its origins six years ago to include research resources from UAMS, ACRI and CAVHS.

“I’m thrilled with this turnout,” she said. “It’s great to see everybody here and feel the enthusiasm in this room tonight.”

Shuk-Mei Ho, Ph.D., vice chancellor for the Division of Research and Innovation, said she was also thrilled that so many colleagues participated, noting that UAMS’ faculty, staff and students are hungry for new knowledge and innovations that can improve human health. Successful research projects, she said, require the support of a large group of research administrators.

“They are the heroes behind the frontline. They work tirelessly behind the scenes helping researchers with protocols, submissions, compliance, regulatory affairs, fiscal management, contracts and tech transfer,” Ho said. “They are the bells and whistles of any new research endeavor. Research Expo 2022 was a great event allowing the ‘engines’ to meet the ‘bells and whistles.’”

Nadim Nicolas Ghanem, M.D., a first-year fellow in the UAMS/Arkansas Children’s Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program, is new to the United States, so having face-to-face conversations with people at the expo was especially valuable, he said.

“Seeing all the available resources for research was great for someone like me coming from abroad,” Ghanem said. “It was a great day to meet new people and to learn more about the different tools I can potentially use in research.”

Zhong Su, Ph.D., MBA, who joined UAMS from the University of Florida in 2021, said the expo was a great way to gain institutional knowledge that he needs as a researcher.

“It’s a really good opportunity for people to get all the different aspects of research-related information right away,” said Su, a professor in the College of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. “You can talk to the people directly, quickly, instead of having to dig on the website.”

Su, a medical physicist, said he was happy to learn about the many sources of support, including grant funding opportunities, which he plans to pursue as part of his work with Arkansas’ first Proton Center. Proton therapy is a state-of-the-art technology that serves as an alternative to conventional radiation therapy, using a precisely focused high-energy proton beam to target tumors, often in hard-to-reach areas, with minimum impact of surrounding healthy tissue.

Sharon Sanders, Ph.D., MPH, said the expo is helpful to her role as research program manager at the Center for Childhood Obesity Prevention based at ACRI.

“As a community engagement person, I’m always looking for an opportunity to network with different people,” Sanders said. “The resources represented here at the expo can be helpful for our researchers at the Center for Childhood Obesity Prevention. We want to make sure we have as many resources and tools available to them as possible to make them more successful.”

For example, she said the Translational Research Institute-supported Center for Health Literacy can be a good resource for researchers at her center.

“Like our community engagement program, the Center for Health Literacy emphasizes the importance of communication and making sure that researchers use plain language and avoid jargon,” Sanders said. “We will point our researchers to the Center for Health Literacy because that is a resource that will be very helpful to them.”

Jansen pointed to the Center for Implementation Research and Center for Health Literacy as examples of newly discovered beneficial resources.

“They can help me with clinical trials as I am setting them up to ensure that they go smoothly and the methodology is sound,” Jansen said.

Ghanem said he especially enjoyed talking with representatives of the Translational Research Institute-supported Arkansas Clinical Data Repository and from the Institute for Digital Health & Innovation and BioVentures.

“As a Clinical Informatics fellow, that was more of my domain,” he said. “We can analyze UAMS’ data repositories to find new patterns and hopefully help improve care. And as family physician, I enjoyed playing around with the point of care devices IDHI had to offer while discovering new opportunities to provide care in the digital era.”

“It was also great to connect with the Institutional Review Board representatives,” Ghanem said. “It’s always important to ensure that the process goes smoothly with the IRB. Everyone was really nice, and it was great to connect with them.”

In this month’s TRIbune newsletter, we highlight the productive collaboration of two KL2 Program Scholars, Maryam Garza, Ph.D., and Tremaine Williams, Ed.D. Since establishing their collaboration last year, Garza and Williams have generated three publications and an R01 application. We also note an important KL2 Information Session for prospective applicants on Oct. 6, as well as a Path 2 K Grant Writing Program led by Mario Schootman, Ph.D.

This issue also reports the outcome of TRI’s Summer Writing Challenge 2022, and Our Study of the Month features Sukanthi Kovvuru, M.D., in the Department of Neurology.

Read The TRIbune.

Jennifer L. Vincenzo, Ph.D., MPH, PT, recently became the first UAMS researcher to receive the national Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders Career Development Award in Aging, which comes with $1 million over five years.

The award will support Vincenzo’s work implementing a falls prevention strategy as a standard of care for all older adults attending outpatient physical therapy clinics. Her work has been supported by a TRI KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award. 

The Beeson award stems from an initiative by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Federation for Aging Research, and the John A. Hartford Foundation. Their aim is “to develop a cadre of talented scientists prepared and willing to take an active leadership role in transformative change that will lead to improved health care outcomes,” according to the American Federation for Aging Research website.

Vincenzo is only the third physical therapist to receive the award, which typically goes to medical doctors.

“I am honored to be a Beeson Scholar and represent UAMS,” said Vincenzo, an associate professor in the College of Health Professions Department of Physical Therapy. “This award will allow me to address the public health issues of falls among older adults, which are a leading cause of morbidity, mortality and decreased quality of life.”

The Beeson award will help her integrate her falls prevention self-management plan that she developed in the last three years with the STEADI (Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths & Injuries) toolkit developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The STEADI toolkit, established in 2012 for physicians to integrate falls prevention into daily practice, has not been widely adopted, but Vincenzo wants to change that. Her goal is to work with stakeholders to implement the integrated program as a standard of care in outpatient physical therapy clinics, starting at UAMS.

Vincenzo established her fall prevention self-management plan through work supported by a UAMS Translational Research Institute KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award. She credits the KL2 support that began in 2019 as a key to her success. She received two years (plus a one-year extension) of salary support, research funding, and translational research training, including training in implementation science.

“I would not be where I am without the support of UAMS, the Translational Research Institute, and especially my colleagues in the Department of Physical Therapy,” she said. “The Beeson award will allow me to advance my knowledge and skills as an implementation scientist in aging under the mentorship of Geoffrey Curran, Ph.D., and Jeanne Wei, M.D., Ph.D., who also served as mentors on my KL2.”

Curran is director of the UAMS Center for Implementation Research and professor of pharmacy practice in the College of Pharmacy. Wei is executive director of the UAMS Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging and chair of the Donald W. Reynolds Department of Geriatrics in the College of Medicine.

Translational Research Institute Director Laura James, M.D., said Vincenzo’s success is a great example of how the KL2 program can prepare talented early-career researchers and help them fast track their research programs.

“Dr. Vincenzo has seized on the opportunities provided by the KL2 program, developing and advancing a plan with significant promise for reducing falls among older adults,” said James, UAMS associate vice chancellor of Clinical and Translational Research. “She has also positioned herself for even greater success as a leader in her field.”

Vincenzo’s KL2 work led to state and national leadership appointments, including chair of the Balance and Falls Special Interest Group – American Physical Therapy Association-Geriatrics (APTA-G); and a member of the APTA-G Board.  She is also chair of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Aging in Arkansas.

The KL2 program at the Translational Research Institute is supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, Clinical and Translational Science Award KL2 TR003108.

The UAMS Translational Research Institute (TRI) and UAMS Center for Implementation Research (CIR) have selected five clinical faculty as 2023 Implementation Science Scholars. Using the principles of implementation science, CIR faculty will guide the scholars through 10 didactic sessions per year and provide oversight and mentoring for their experiential implementation science projects. The two-year program will provide 20% salary support (up to salary cap).

The scholars and their project titles are:

Stephen Foster, M.D., assistant professor, College of Medicine Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, UAMS Northeast Regional Campus

Project: Improving Outcomes for Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in the Primary Care Setting through Electronic Health Record Optimization

Chelsea Mathews, M.D., assistant professor, College of Medicine Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, UAMS and Arkansas Children’s Hospital

Project: Improving the Patient Experience through Journey Mapping at the Orthopaedic and Spine Hospital (under construction at UAMS)

Veronica M. Raney, M.D., assistant professor, College of Medicine Department of Psychiatry; interim director, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; medical director, Child Study Center, UAMS 

Project: Implementation of Specialized Mental Health Services to Address Gaps in Care for Transitional Age Youth (TAY)

Jarna Shah, M.D., assistant professor, College of Medicine Department of Anesthesia, Chronic Pain Division, UAMS

Project: Implementation of Nutrition Screening in Patients Undergoing Elective Joint Replacement Surgery

Shruti Tewar, MBBS, MPH, associate professor, College of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, Division of Developmental and Rehabilitative Medicine, UAMS

Project: Implementation of Guidelines for Medication Management of Complex ADHD in Children

UAMS-affiliated researchers who have received Translational Research Institute (TRI) support submitted 77 research manuscripts as part of the Summer 2022 Writing Challenge, TRI Director Laura James, M.D., announced at an Ice Cream Social celebration to recognize the contributing researchers.

Held jointly at UAMS campuses in Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas, the Thursday, Sept. 8 event featuring Loblolly Creamery ice cream included prizes in six categories and numerous door prizes.

“We are thrilled to have received so many manuscript submissions and nearly match our total of 85 a year ago,” James said. “This is a huge accomplishment, reflecting the dedication of our faculty to complete an important part of research, which is the dissemination of research findings. In particular, the enthusiasm of our junior faculty is noteworthy and reflects the energy and vibrancy of our early-stage researcher community.”

Below are the winners announced at Thursday’s event:

Jennifer Andersen, Ph.D.
Astounding Apprentice Award: Most Submitted Manuscripts (seven) for the Rank of Assistant Professor/Instructor
Prize: TRI will pay for a manuscript submission fee

Chenghui Li, Ph.D.
Wise Wordsmith Award: Most Submitted Manuscripts (four) for the Rank of Associate Professor
Prize: Free statistical consultation

David Ussery, Ph.D.
Sage Scribe Award: Most Submitted Manuscripts (four) for the Rank of Professor
Prize: TRI will submit a manuscript

Zulema Udaondo, Ph.D.
Best Representation of Informatics Supported Research
Prize: Wooden pen set

Melissa Zielinski, Ph.D.
Best Representation of Implementation Science
Prize: UAMS tumbler

Jennifer Andersen, Ph.D.
Most Reflective of Community Engagement and Partnerships
Prize: UAMS travel blanket

Umesh Wankhade, Ph.D., won a special door prize added this year, “A Delightful Dinner with the Director (James).”  

The 77 total submissions included:

• 14 submissions from Professors
• 16 submissions from Associate Professors
• 37 submissions from Assistant Professors
• 10 submissions from staff/others.