In this issue of The TRIbune we highlight the honorees of the recent TRI Community Partner Celebration, which recognizes the vital role played by grassroots community groups in the improvement of UAMS’ research, education and health care service missions.

We also report on the positive final assessment of our External Advisory Board as we close out our five-year Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) funding cycle this year.

Our TRI Study of the Month features an NIH-funded artificial intelligence-based heart study led by Subhi Al’Aref, M.D. Read The TRIbune.

For Joyce Raynor, winning the Chancellor’s Community Engaged Research Partner of the Year Award affirmed many years of hard work.

“This award means that we’re on the right track,” said Raynor, founder and executive director of the Center for Healing Hearts & Spirits, which helps victims of violence. “It means that our partnership with UAMS is working, and it’s good.”

The UAMS Translational Research Institute (TRI) recognized some of UAMS’ many community partners at the recent 2023 Community Partner Celebration. The Dec. 1 dinner and awards ceremony drew 78 community partners, researchers and research staff who are working together to tackle health-related issues in communities across Arkansas. 

In addition to Raynor’s organization, the award winners are:

• Community Engaged Student/Trainee of the Year: Alice Gardner, a health promotion and prevention research doctoral student in the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health.
• Community Advisory Board of the Year Award: Arkansas Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Coalition
• Community Engaged Research Staff Member of the Year: Elizabeth Taylor, College of Public Health
• M. Kate Stewart Community Engaged Researcher of the Year: Nakita Lovelady, Ph.D., assistant professor, College of Public Health

Raynor founded the Center for Healing Hearts & Spirits in Little Rock after her son was killed by gun violence in 2001. The center has worked with UAMS on multiple research and service projects, including with Lovelady, who nominated Raynor for the award.

“The Center for Healing Hearts & Spirits works closely with frontline workers to connect violent assault survivors with critical social services to optimize recovery and prevent subsequent violence,” Lovelady said. “The center provides a range of victim services to violent assault survivors enrolled in the studies. Joyce has an intricate understanding of the issue of violence and survivorship. This affords her an exceptional ability to lead and reach survivors in ways that words can’t begin to explain.”

Lovelady, a K12 Mentored Research Career Development Award Scholar, received the inaugural M. Kate Stewart Community Engaged Researcher of the Year Award. She and her mentor, Nickolas Zaller, Ph.D., recently received a $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to support a community-engaged violence prevention program.

“Dr. Lovelady truly understands the factors that contribute to community violence in Arkansas, and she works very hard to find innovative solutions to address those issues and meet people where they are,” said Raynor, who nominated Lovelady for the inaugural award honoring Stewart, who retired this year as director of TRI’s Community Engagement Program. 

Lovelady was excited to receive the award, noting Stewart’s strong legacy and influence on the next generation of community engagement researchers.

“It is such an honor to win this award!” she said. “It’s extra special to receive an award in honor of my great mentor and friend Dr. Kate Stewart. She introduced to me to community-engaged research more than a decade ago and served as one of the best examples of a community engaged researcher.”

Stewart joined the College of Public Health when it was founded in 2001 and led TRI’s Community Engagement Program since it was established in 2009. She created and oversaw numerous innovative programs that have elevated the status of community-engaged research in Arkansas and across the United States.

UAMS researcher Keneshia Bryant-Moore, Ph.D., APRN, FNC-BC, also received an Honorary M. Kate Stewart Award to recognize her many significant contributions to community-engaged research at UAMS over the last decade. She is a professor in the College of Public Health and graduate of the TRI KL2 (now K12) Scholar Award Program. Her many achievements include establishing the Arkansas FAITH Network, a robust group of church leaders from across the state who have become important partners in community-engaged research.

In this issue of The TRIbune, we highlight our important collaboration with Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) institutions to address health in rural populations. TRI leaders were among the participants at the Consortium of Rural States (CORES) Fall Meeting in advance of the consortium’s recent request for applications for interinstitutional collaborations.

We also feature TRI KL2 Scholar Nakita Lovelady, Ph.D., and her recent grant for a violence prevention project with her mentor, Nickolas Zaller, Ph.D. In addition, we spotlight TRI’s recent Community Partner Dinner, which drew representatives of more than 30 community groups, researchers and staff.

Our Study of the Month features a multi-site phase 3 neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) clinical trial led at UAMS by Whit Hall, M.D.Read The TRIbune.

The Translational Research Institute (TRI) is pleased to invite applications for its K12 (formerly KL2) Mentored Research Career Development Scholar Award Program.

K12 scholars receive two years of didactic and mentored research training, including 75% salary support (up to $100,000) and $25,000 each year for research related expenses such as supplies, travel, etc.

The overall goal of the program is to increase the number and quality of independently funded clinical and translational science investigators.

Letters of Intent are due Feb. 1, 2024.

Early-career researchers are encouraged to attend the K12 Program information session on Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2-3 p.m., via Zoom. 

During the session, K12 program leaders John Arthur, M.D., Ph.D., Elisabet Borsheim, Ph.D., and Mario Schootman, Ph.D., will provide an overview and answer questions about this prestigious translational research training program.

Register here for the information session.

Read the 2024 K12 RFA here.

Contact: Nik Berardi, NDBerardi@uams.edu

Alberto Ramirez, Ph.D., was excited to attend Research Expo 2023, with its 50 research services and resources on display.

“As an early-career researcher, the event proved to be remarkably valuable as it allowed me to gain insight into the numerous resources offered by UAMS, including TRI, Research & Innovation, and more, which have the potential to greatly support my nascent research journey,” said Ramirez, a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Sponsored by the Translational Research Institute (TRI), the Oct. 11 event at the UAMS Jackson T. Stephens Spine & Neurosciences Institute building drew 114 attendees who got to visit with leaders of all the key research services at UAMS, Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) and Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System (CAVHS).

“This expo is great for new faculty members like me who are conducting research,” said Lipika Sarangi, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the College of Health Professions Department of Audiology & Speech Pathology. “It’s wonderful to have an event where you can meet new people, build your network, and find exactly the information that might be useful for your research today or in the future.”

For example, she was able to learn how to access potential research volunteers in the ARresearch database established by TRI. The database includes more than 9,000 Arkansans who have agreed to be contacted for research studies.

“They told me the process, and I will definitely use ARresearch in the future,” she said. “The resources I have found here will be very helpful for participant recruitment, grant writing and manuscript writing. I am looking forward to using these resources for my independent and collaborative research.”

Emel Seker, M.S., an applications system analyst in the College of Medicine, said the expo provided a unique opportunity to discover cutting-edge resources and connect with individuals who share a passion for research.

“The expo was an invaluable experience for me, underscoring the significance of collaborative platforms in research,” Seker said. “I was particularly impressed by the number of representatives from various research services. Meeting like-minded professionals who are not only knowledgeable but also open to collaboration was a highlight. I believe these connections have the potential to lead to meaningful collaborations in the future.”

Ramirez said he was particularly interested in the opportunities available to assist with the grant-writing process and the potential benefits of the TRI Community Engagement Program. “I am definitely planning to establish connections with these resources.”

In addition, he said, “the event emphasized the importance of networking, facilitating connections among all the stakeholders involved in the research process, from the initial spark of an

idea in the researcher’s mind to the practical implementation of results, all aimed at making a positive impact on the community.”

TRI is supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, Clinical and Translational Science Award number UL1 TR003107.

Before the terms “life-course” and “lifespan” research became more commonplace, Rosalind Wright, M.D., MPH, began studying how early-life experiences were contributing to the conditions she was seeing in her adult pulmonary patients.

Wright, a research leader at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was a keynote speaker for the inaugural Advancing Arkansas Lifespan Research Conference in September, sponsored by TRI, Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI), and the Lifespan Cardiometabolic Health Creativity Hub in the College of Medicine.

To help make her case for lifespan research, she invoked the quote, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” 

“When I’m taking care of patients in their 40s, 50s and 60s and they’ve already got multiple comorbidities and their lungs are shot, there’s only so much I can do,” she told a diverse audience of UAMS-affiliated researchers at the Robinson Center in Little Rock. “But if we pursue this life-course perspective, we have a real opportunity to make a difference.”

Wright is dean for Translational Biomedical Sciences and holds the Horace W. Goldsmith Professorship in Children’s Health Research at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital and principal investigator for the Institute for Clinical and Translational Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine. She is a developmental epidemiologist with transdisciplinary training in environmental health and stress mechanisms.

Wright gave one of three keynote presentations during the Sept. 13, 14 conference.

Other keynote speakers were Fred Prior, Ph.D., distinguished professor and chair of the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Biomedical Informatics, and Amanda Dettmer, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine.

Elisabet Borsheim, Ph.D., Laura James, M.D., and Peter Mourani, M.D., served as the event’s moderators. 

Borsheim, a professor in the College of Medicine departments of Pediatrics and Geriatrics, leads the Cardiometabolic Health Creativity Hub.

James is TRI director and UAMS associate vice chancellor for Clinical and Translational Research.

Mourani is president of ACRI and senior vice president and chief research officer for Arkansas Children’s.

Life-course research is a key part of ACRI’s strategic plan and it is advocated by the NIH and its National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) to strategically promote health and combat diseases as they progress across the lifespan.

ARLife

Prior’s presentation introduced an exciting new data integration system called ARLife that will be key to lifespan research for UAMS-affiliated researchers.

“ARLife is the first baby step toward building an informatics and data management resource that allows us to really do lifespan research effectively here in Arkansas, to be able to track all of our people across their lifespan,” he said.

It will be pilot tested as part of a new life-course research grant opportunity announced during the conference. The one-year $100,000 award is being offered by ACRI with funds from the Arkansas Biosciences Institute.  

Prior and his team have expertise in data integration having led development of similar tools and processes nationally and internationally.

“We’re using what we’ve learned to crosslink databases in a privacy-preserving way,” Prior said.

ARLife can link and harmonize electronic health records data from UAMS, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, and the UAMS Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, which maintains the Arkansas All-Payer Claims Database.

Dettmer said the CTSA-funded Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI) is working to harmonize datasets and find collaborating institutions as part of the effort.

“We’re really keen to foster collaborations with other CTSAs so that we can show NCATS that we’re collaborating across CTSAs to really leverage existing resources to spawn and launch lifespan research,” she said.

Primate Studies

The YCCI lifespan initiative emphasizes critical developmental periods and how early-life stress may impact typical biological development and lifelong health.

One of the challenges studying humans, Dettmer said, is that much of the work necessarily relies on retrospective accounts, and if the studies are prospective it takes decades to get age-related health outcomes.

Long-term research at Yale with rhesus monkeys, which have about a 30-year lifespan, can be an important complement to human lifespan studies, she said.

“Rhesus monkeys are an extremely valuable comparative and causal model for lifespan health,” she said.

Conference attendee and poster presenter Andrew Brown, Ph.D., was excited to see UAMS and ACRI-based researchers come together with wide-ranging expertise for conducting lifespan research.

“The conference was an inspiring collaboration between ACRI and TRI that really walked the talk of needing to work across disciplinary silos if we want to improve the lives of Arkansans,” said Brown, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and a biostatistics core director for the Center for Childhood Obesity Prevention at ACRI.

He said the announcement of the $100,000 grant demonstrates the commitment to lifespan research.

The conference also included a poster session as well as oral presentations from Keshari Thakali, Ph.D., Steven Barger, Ph.D., Jamie I. Baum, Ph.D., Ashley Acheson, Ph.D., Tatiana Wolfe, Ph.D., and Craig Porter, Ph.D.

In this issue of The TRIbune, we feature a research project co-led by one of our KL2 scholar graduates, Taren Swindle, Ph.D., that is utilizing the resources of the UAMS Rural Research Network. Swindle and Lorraine McKelvey, Ph.D., are using the network to study an expansion of their innovative nutrition education program, Together, We Inspire Smart Eating (WISE).

This issue also includes our Study of the Month, featuring a multi-site stroke study led at UAMS by Sanjeeva Onteddu, M.D., with research services provided by TRI.  

We also highlight the results of our Summer Writing Challenge 2023, which concluded with an ice cream celebration and award ceremony.

Read The TRIbune. 

Our latest TRIbune newsletter features a UAMS academic-community partnership recently funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) that was informed and inspired by TRI’s Community-Based Participatory Research Scholars Program. 

The team led by Melissa Zielinski, Ph.D., is using a $250,000 PCORI award to address health issues among women involved in the justice system. 

Our TRI Study of the Month features Laura Hays, Ph.D., and her UAMS Rural Research Network-supported study in collaboration with the UAMS North Central Family Medical Center in Batesville. 

We also highlight our two new Health Sciences Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HSIE) trainees, postdoctoral fellows who will receive two years of support as they learn how to commercialize their ideas. 

Read The TRIbune.

Akilah Jefferson, M.D., M.Sc., a TRI KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award scholar, has been published in the journal Pediatrics, with an article titled, “Asthma Quality Measurement and Adverse Outcomes in Medicaid-Enrolled Children.”

Jefferson and her coauthors found that a key tool used to evaluate pediatric risk of asthma-related adverse events may be a poor method for guiding pediatric population health management programs across diverse settings. The findings related to the tool, called the asthma medication ratio (AMR), were based on analyses using the Arkansas All-Payer Claims Database to identify Medicaid-enrolled children.

“AMR performed poorly in identifying risk of adverse outcomes among Medicaid-enrolled children with asthma,” the article concluded, noting that new population health frameworks are needed to accurately identify children with asthma and improve asthma management and outcomes.

Jefferson is an assistant professor in the College of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, Division of Allergy and Immunology.

The TRI KL2 Scholars Program provides promising young clinical and translational investigators the training, mentoring and protected time to develop an independent research program. Learn more about the program here.

The UAMS Translational Research Institute Health Sciences Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HSIE) Postdoctoral Training Program has named two postdoctoral scholars for its class of 2023. The scholars, selected in a competitive application process, will receive two years of mentored entrepreneurship training.

The HSIE postdoctoral trainees, their research goals and mentors are:

Henry A. Palfrey, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Pharmacy Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. His research goal is to conduct studies to screen a library of compounds and determine the ability of novel epoxylipid drugs to provide protection against radiation-induced kidney and cardiovascular injury

Mentor: John D. Imig, Ph.D., professor and chair, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences; and vice president for therapeutics at BioVentures LLC. 

Ashley Pike, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Brain Imaging Research Center of the Psychiatric Research Institute (PRI). Her primary research goal is to implement advanced neuroimaging techniques for clinical problem solving in multiple sclerosis (MS). Mentor: Tatiana Wolfe, Ph.D., assistant professor, medical imaging physicist, PRI, College of Medicine Department of Psychiatry