Project Title: Innovative Solutions to Streamline Data Collection, Exchange, and Utilization in Translational Research
Maryam Y. Garza, PhD, MPH, MMCi, is an Instructor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the UAMS College of Medicine.  The KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award will support her efforts to evaluate the potential for standards-based solutions to streamline data collection, improve data quality, and reduce data collection time within the context of clinical registries and the optimization of clinical research.
As more federal regulations require reporting to clinical data registries, the role of registries in clinical practice, clinical research, and public health has never been more significant.  Registries provide a rich source of information that can be leveraged to improve patient and population health outcomes.  That said, registries often rely on manual medical record abstraction (MRA) to extract EHR data and can act as a primary data source for use in clinical research studies.  These manual approaches have had a negative impact on cost and data quality, primarily due to the complexities associated with MRA.  Standards-based solutions have the potential to address these issues by automating part or all of the data collection process, and rigorous assessment and comparison of performance on data quality, site burden, and cost outcomes is urgently needed.  Thus, this project will evaluate the Health Level Seven (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard in the context of three existing clinical data registries for which manual MRA is the prominent mechanism for data collection.  The results of this will inform other standards-based solutions for improving data collection by providing evidence to support the use of the HL7 FHIR standards for the direct extraction of EHR data in research.
Dr. Garza joined the Department of Biomedical Informatics in 2017 from the Duke Translational Research Institute, where she worked on and managed several HL7 data standards development projects in collaboration with the FDA.  She received her Master of Management in Clinical Informatics (MMCi) from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in 2013, and later completed an MPH (2018) and a PhD in Biomedical Informatics (2020) from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.  She draws upon nearly a decade of experience in clinical research informatics and data management to inform her evolving research, which seeks to challenge and shift current research practice by utilizing new standards and helping to assure that these new healthcare data standards support research.
Mentors:
Fred Prior, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, UAMS; Professor of Radiology, College of Medicine, UAMS
Joseph Sanford, M.D., Associate Vice Chancellor – Chief Clinical Informatics Officer (CCIO), UAMS; Director, Institute for Digital Health and Innovation (IDHI), UAMS; Associate Professor, Department of Anesthesiology, College of Medicine, UAMS; Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, UAMS
Kevin Sexton, M.D., Associate Chief Medical Officer, UAMS; Associate Chief Clinical Informatics Officer for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship, UAMS; Associate Director, Institute for Digital Health and Innovation (IDHI), UAMS; Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, College of Medicine, UAMS; Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, UAMS; Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, College of Medicine, UAMS; Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacy Practice, College of Medicine, UAMS
Meredith Zozus, Ph.D., CCDM, Professor, Div. Chief and Director of Clinical Research Informatics, Department of Population Health Sciences, Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio

Project Title: “Targeting Homologous Repair to Overcome Genotoxic Therapy Resistance in Pancreatic Cancer”
Adam Wolfe, M.D., Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). As a physician-scientist, he treats patients with gastrointestinal cancers at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute using state-of-the-art radiation therapy. His research focus is on discovering novel therapy strategies for the deadly disease of pancreatic cancer. In the lab, he utilizes genetic and proteomic approaches to address the fundamental mechanisms of genetic alterations in cancer cells which result in heightened DNA repair leading to radiation and chemotherapy resistance. Dr. Wolfe received a KL2 Mentored Career Development Award in 2021 to investigate the mechanism underlying the role of oncogenic KRAS in regulating the nuclear DNA repair enzyme RAD18, a major promoter of DNA repair in pancreatic cancer. The goals of this KL2 award are to propel the independent physician-scientist career of Dr. Wolfe, and to understand the mechanisms of efficient DNA repair in order to develop novel targeted therapies for more effective treatment strategies of pancreatic cancer.
Dr. Wolfe joined the UAMS faculty in 2021 after completing his residency in Radiation Oncology at the Ohio State University (OSU) where he completed a Holman fellowship researching DNA repair mechanisms of resistance in pancreatic and thyroid cancers.  He was awarded research funding from both the Radiation Oncology Institute (ROI) and Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) during his fellowship at OSU. He received his dual M.D. and Ph.D degrees from the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at The University of Texas McGovern Medical School and MD Anderson Cancer Center Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in 2016.
Mentors:
Fen Xia, M.D., Ph.D. Professor, Chair, Department of Radiation Oncology
Alan Tackett, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Kevin Raney, Ph.D. Professor and Chair, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Marjan Boerma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Justin Leung, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Radiation and Cancer Biology