National Institutes of Health

Bioengineering alumna completes a fun(gal) summer internship with NIH

Shayla Brown — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 18:07:12 +0000

Bioengineering alumna completes a fun(gal) summer internship with NIH Shayla Brown Fri, 09/13/2024 - 14:07

��AV bioengineering alumna Alessandra Coogan took advantage of all the opportunities associated with her internship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this summer. That included NIH workshops and seminars where Coogan was able to tap into various institutes and branches of engineering, as well as network with professional engineers.

“I thought interning at NIH meant that you come to the lab, work, then leave, but it's actually a huge institution and offers so many opportunities to socialize, network, and developing yourself as a professional scientist. It was really amazing,” said Coogan.

Alessandra Coogan. Photo provided.

Coogan’s internship through the Biomedical Engineering Summer Internship Program (BESIP) ran 10 weeks from June 3 to August 10.

“It's a little bit more competitive for bioengineering-related lab research. There's only 24 of us [in the BESIP program] in total, and it’s a very close-knit community program,” said Coogan, an Honors College student who graduated in May with her bachelor's in bioengineering with a concentration in biomaterials and nanomedicine from the College of Engineering and Computing.

The lab project pertains to immuno-engineering, which combines immunology and engineering, and explores the origins and potential mitigation of autoimmune responses triggered by implants in the body.

Coogan conducted research and development on drug delivery, tissue engineering, and scaffold development, which is a particular interest of hers.

“I love wet lab and getting my hands dirty while working on projects and experiments, and this experience definitely solidified that for me in terms of what I hope to do professionally,” said Coogan.

Alessandra Coogan in a National Institutes of Health lab. Photo provided.

Coogan was also given the chance to work on a second independent project, which is pretty rare. It focused on the treatment of fungal infections in the upper respiratory tract.

“A lot of treatments for fungal infections in your mouth, your lungs, your nose, especially in the nasal cavity, are aggressive and very systemic,” said Coogan.

For certain treatments, medical professionals might have to inject an antifungal medication through an IV into the bloodstream, she explained.

“It’s kind of overkill,” Coogan said. “The treatments are harmful to patients’ kidneys and liver. My research aims to provide a local application of an antifungal medication using a hydrogel, so my experiments consist of staining cells and processing tissue. It’s been a very fun but very difficult project,” she said.

Coogan credits George Mason’s Bioengineering Department for preparing her to take on a role of this caliber with NIH.

“Our department is small but mighty, and they really focus on creating excellent scientists,” said Coogan. “I've done a lot of research with Professor Rémi Veneziano in the [Laboratory for Bio-Inspired Nanoarchitectures] for two years now, and I've learned a lot from him. His research is on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, which really interested me.”

“I feel that I have been very lucky to have Alessandra as a student in my lab,” Veneziano said. “She is very driven, and has the background, the knowledge, and the technical skills to become an excellent researcher.”

Alessandra Coogan with NIH colleagues. Photo provided.

Coogan is always willing to lend a hand to her peers, training them and sharing her research, said Veneziano.

“She also developed excellent [problem-solving] skills that she was able to leverage to perform complex experiments and help one of my graduate students in a very challenging project,” said Veneziano.

Whenever possible, Veneziano encourages his students to attend conferences and present their work to other researchers in order to build a network and also see what other labs are doing in their fields and other fields. Earlier this year, Coogan presented her work on prosthetic liners at the topping off ceremony for Fuse at Mason Square alongside her peers.

Coogan returns to George Mason this fall to earn her accelerated master’s in bioengineering, and Veneziano will be her committee chair.

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Remi Veneziano

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George Mason researchers receive $1.78M from NIH for work improving the health of mothers, children

Shayla Brown — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 16:57:43 +0000

George Mason researchers receive $1.78M from NIH for work improving the health of mothers, children Shayla Brown Wed, 06/05/2024 - 12:57

��AV scientists, nurses, and researchers in the College of Public Health have just entered the second cycle of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program called Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO).

The NIH grant provides ECHO teams across the country with a total of $7 million a year for seven years to research five outcomes of women and children: pre-, peri-, and postnatal outcomes; upper and lower airways; obesity; neurodevelopment; and positive health. George Mason will receive $1.78 million every year throughout this cycle.

An ECHO researcher taking measurements of a child participant. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding.

The cohort, which includes Boston Children’s Hospital, is led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. George Mason is the only university in Virginia participating in the project. The research being done for the ECHO project is part of a new set of research initiatives made possible with the opening of the Population Health Center on the Fairfax Campus.

They are currently re-recruiting participants from the first cycle. They have confirmed just over 300 participants out of 1,512. The youngest participant is under one year old and the oldest is 12.

“We’re aiming to gather information about women and children in a longitudinal manner to compare to our data to that of Omaha, Nebraska, or Iowa. Learning about the regional disparities will then allow us to use them to influence national policy,” said principal investigator Kathi Huddleston, PhD ’08, an associate professor in the College of Public Health.

Huddleston said George Mason’s robust PhD nursing program and her dissertation research on pediatric emergency preparedness helped to prepare her for this extensive project.

The team studied the effects of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever” chemicals, as well as air pollution modeling, sleep patterns, nutrition, and COVID-19, gathering real-time data and look at their associations with child health outcomes, such as child obesity, immunization rates and more.

This research from the first cycle of ECHO revealed that school lunch consumption was associated with increased obesity in children and prompted policy change that strengthen the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA). This resulted in a significant decrease in the overall body mass index among school-aged youths and will have substantial health benefits on generations of children.

More results from the first cycle included changes in sleep patterns due to COVID-19 and disparities in sleep patterns between children of different racial/ethnic backgrounds. The team also found that there is a strong relationship between the health of the mother at pre- and early conception and the overall health of children. For example, babies born to mothers with higher levels of toxic metals were more likely to be underweight, which could lead to future health issues.

“If we want to have healthy kids, we have to have healthy moms,” said Huddleston.

As part of cycle two, the researchers will recruit more pregnant women to gain additional insight, including women who were patients at Inova Health System and have also been working with a lot of the same kids for many years, said Grace Lawrence, PhD ’18, director of research clinical operations for the ECHO project.

Student researchers Daisy Posada, Seema Poudel, and Shiva Zarean. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding.

Also on the team are Alma Fuller, nursing student Shiva Zarean, and research project administrators Daisy Posada BA ’13, MA ’18, and Bruna Mayen, a biology major who also acts as the project and lab manager. Mayen’s role as lab manager includes collecting teeth, hair, and urine samples to test the progression of health and well-being in the participants as they grow.

“I ensure samples are stored at required optimal conditions and freezers are monitored daily,” said Mayen. “I also perform data entry and quality assurance/quality control of all data and samples.”

“Each interaction with the participants is so special, it brings potential for new connections and enriches the overall experience and impact they have on the study and us on their development,” said Mayen.

The families come into the research facility once a year so researchers can record each family member’s weight, height, and head and waist circumferences, as well as their body fat percentage.

“We were in the ECHO study when my first child was a newborn. Then my second child was born, and we just kept going,” said Cassie Gallagher, a mom of three young children, all of who participate in the ECHO study. “We’ve been very active in the study, we send in nails, teeth, everything.”

“I also appreciate how thorough the questions are in the surveys that they send us because they’re trying to get the important answers. Especially when they ask about our stress level and different environmental aspects,” said Gallagher.

The project encompasses the concept of citizen science as the participants provide all of the information being used to create an impact in public health. They also receive quarterly updates with the researchers’ findings.

“One of the understated benefits of this study is that children are encouraged to participate firsthand in science and gather an understanding of science in a very personal way,” said Huddleston. “We have received wonderful feedback from the kids about how they feel giving new information to better all children’s health.”

In This Story

Dr. Kathi Huddleston, PhD, MSN

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$500K NIH grant will focus on interventions for youth substance abuse

Colleen Rich — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 18:21:47 +0000

$500K NIH grant will focus on interventions for youth substance abuse Colleen Rich Wed, 09/13/2023 - 14:21

��AV psychology professor Tara Chaplin has been awarded a National Institutes of Health Independent Research Scientist Award for her research on understanding the role of parenting and emotional arousal in the development of substance use in adolescence.

Tara Chaplin. Photo provided

Chaplin’s research will ultimately result in increasing understanding of adolescent substance use and in developing novel and highly accessible smartphone interventions to prevent youth substance use.

The award will provide Chaplin with cutting-edge advanced training to enhance her career and transform her program of research. Through this training, Chaplin will integrate ecological momentary assessment science into her expertise in developmental neuroscience to understand from a neural and momentary level parenting, emotion, and substance use associations in adolescence.

The award will also support a research study examining the interplay between neural responses and momentary vulnerabilities to more fully understand the role of parenting and emotional arousal in the development of substance use in adolescence. It will provide the infrastructure to support future developmental studies and smartphone-delivered momentary intervention studies.

“This award recognizes Dr. Chaplin’s incredible accomplishments in research to date,” said Timothy Curby, psychology professor and interim chair of the Department of Psychology. “Dr. Chaplin already has a track record of innovative and important funded research. This award sets the stage for her to elevate and expand her groundbreaking research on substance use and parenting—research that exemplifies Psychology Department goals around conducting research of consequence.”

The award is a four-year grant of $125,166 per year.

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Innovate for Good: Mason Professor continues study of social media intervention for Chinese American caregivers with grant from NIH National Institute on Aging

Mary Cunningham — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:20:01 +0000

Innovate for Good: Mason Professor continues study of social media intervention for Chinese American caregivers with grant from NIH National Institute on Aging Mary Cunningham Fri, 09/01/2023 - 11:20

As Baby Boomer generation continues to age, the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) is increasing. Today, more than six million Americans are living with dementia. Family caregivers of people living with ADRD experience high levels of psychosocial distress, and many of the caregivers themselves are older adults themselves. There is a lack of support for these family caregivers, and Chinese American caregivers face additional challenges in caregiving and self-care due to their immigrant and minority status.

Professor in ��AV's College of Public Health Y. Alicia Hong received a one-year $115,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health—National Institute of Aging Emory Roybal Center to expand her study of a social media intervention for Chinese American caregivers of people with dementia. The interprofessional team will test the Wellness Enhancement for Caregivers (WECARE) intervention program, an app-based personalized behavior intervention, to improve their confidence in caregiving and reduce social-emotional distress.

“Caring for a family member or loved one with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) is challenging and stressful, caregivers often experience negative health outcomes as a result. As American population becomes older and more diverse, more support is needed for family caregivers, but interventions for racial minority caregivers have been limited. WECARE is designed for Chinese American dementia caregivers to enhance their caregiving skills, reduce stress, and improve well-being,” said Hong, the principal investigator.

With a 2021 seed grant from Virginia Center for Aging, Hong and her team first developed the WECARE protocol, which was published in JMIR Aging in June 2022. From there, the team piloted the protocol with 24 Chinese American dementia caregivers. The results from the pilot were published in JMIR Aging in April 2023.

The pilot study indicated WECARE is feasible, acceptable, and effective as a culturally tailored intervention via a social media app. Study participants reported that using the app reduced depressive symptoms and caregivers’ burden. This study informs future research on digital interventions to support dementia caregivers, especially underserved minority caregivers.

Using funding from the National Institute of Aging grant, the team will add more personalized features to WECARE and test it with a larger sample size of participants. Caregivers will learn to apply problem-solving strategies, which can boost self-efficacy and master of caregiving, leading to positive health outcomes for themselves and those they care for. The program will include personalized feedback to reinforce learning, social networking to enhance social support, and location-specific resources.

The research team includes Pramita Bagchi in Mason’s Department of of Statistics and Jessica Lin in Mason’s Department of Computer Science. Additional consultants on the project include Van Ta Park at the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing, Hae-Ra Han at Johns Hopkins University, and Kate Lu from the Chinese Culture and Community Service Center.

Innovate for Good is an ongoing series that examines how Mason faculty in the College of Public Health are harnessing technology to improve health outcomes. If you have stories to share as part of the Innovate for Good series, email Mary Cunningham at mcunni7@gmu.edu.

In This Story

Y. Alicia Hong, PhD

Jessica Lin

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In the George

Mason Statistics Collaboration Core partners with Inova

Tama Moni — Wed, 11 May 2022 20:27:14 +0000

Mason Statistics Collaboration Core partners with Inova Tama Moni Wed, 05/11/2022 - 16:27

The ��AV College of Engineering and Computing statistics department and its Statistics Collaboration Core is working with Inova Health Care Services as part of a partnership called “iTHRIV.” Inova is Northern Virginia’s leading nonprofit healthcare provider, with 20,000+ team members providing more than two million patient visits each year at five hospitals. This partnership is funded by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

“The collaboration with Inova Health is one of the examples of Mason Statistics actively collaborating in and/or taking leadership positions on large projects aimed at impacting science and society,” says Jiayang Sun, chair of the Mason Department of Statistics. Ben Sieyon Lee, a faculty member in the department, adds, “By connecting experts from both Mason and Inova, we are able to explore exciting research opportunities at the intersection of statistics and health care research. Many would have been otherwise overlooked.”

The Collaboration Core works with external organizations to provide support in the areas of statistical expertise; grant, manuscript writing, and conference abstract writings; survey design; research in statistics and data science; and interdisciplinary collaboration. The Collaboration Core website guides outside groups through the project proposal process.

The Core allows Mason faculty to be engaged with research in new ways and helps new, tenure-track faculty get exposed to grant work and external collaborators. In addition, it allows the university to establish itself as a leader in data science. “Our graduate students also play an active role in these collaborations,” says Lee. “They gain valuable experience in applying their statistical knowledge to real-world challenges.”

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Statistics Faculty

Healthcare

National Institutes of Health

Using virtual reality to support addiction recovery

Colleen Rich — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:05:59 +0000

Using virtual reality to support addiction recovery Colleen Rich Mon, 10/19/2020 - 05:05

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Addiction

Substance Use

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Can virtual reality help people with substance abuse issues avoid a relapse? A team of ��AV researchers thinks it just might.

Image courtesy of Brightline Interactive

The multidisciplinary team, which includes faculty members Holly Matto, Padmanabhan Seshaiyer, Stephanie Carmack, and Nathalia Peixoto, and graduate student Matthew Scherbel, is working with Brightline Interactive to examine the effects of recovery cues, using virtual reality simulations, on neurophysiological regulation to prevent drug relapse.

The work is supported by a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institutes of Health. Brightline Interactive is a team of creative technologists that designs and builds virtual reality experiences, specializing in rapid development of custom end-to-end hardware/software solutions. These solutions use immersive virtual reality/augmented reality/extended reality technologies and techniques, such as motion, object, optical and facial tracking, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and sensor-integration, to allow for simulated utilization of physical objects in virtual reality environments for simulation and training purposes.

Matto is a social worker who worked with individuals in recovery from substance use before she became a university professor. She has used that practice experience to guide her research with diverse clinical populations.

“It’s my favorite population to work with,” said Matto, who is an associate professor in the Department of Social Work in the College of Health and Human Services.

Matto found that the first weeks in recovery are a tricky time for individuals in recovery, with a critical need for support to maintain their sobriety goals, especially when it comes to dealing with triggers, those sensory reminders of their substance use within their environment that might cause a relapse.

“It takes more than a strong commitment to be sober,” Matto says. “You may not be able to think your way through [when triggered].”

She said research shows that intensity of craving experience can still be quite high even after two months of abstinence. This led Matto to think about the importance of real-time interventions to support recovery when these individuals leave treatment.

“We are interested in understanding how we can disrupt the drug trigger-craving-relapse chain by using customized recovery cue substitutions—positive stimuli associated with recovery—to regulate the brain and body’s reaction to the people, places, objects and other daily stimuli that increase relapse risk for people in recovery,” she said.

The intervention the team is working on with Brightline involves virtual reality and having the person wearing the VR goggles interact with triggering objects while being able to assess their physiological response.

The team did some preliminary work this summer with students in Mason’s Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program. One of their interns, Noah Egan, a 2020 Brentsville District High School graduate, taught himself how to use the game engine Unity in order to create what is very similar to a 3D video game in which a person would interact with an addiction trigger or cue.

“We have some new ideas that haven’t been used in social work before, which is the point of adding engineering to a community problem,” said Peixoto, an associate professor in the Volgenau School of Engineering who mentored Egan. “[This intervention] is a little bit more than game design and a little bit more than computer science, because we want to measure physiological variables.”

The Brightline-Mason team plans to build on this initial work and create an in-session interactive VR task that tracks the participant's gaze in order to understand where they are fixating attention on each recovery cue. From this data, the team can assess what imagery is particularly attractive to each participant and identify which cues cause a particular physiological reaction.

The results may lead to the development of a nonpharmacological mobile recovery support system to help individuals manage cravings and avoid relapse.

“I am really excited about this project, not only because it addresses such a critical issue, as we have seen increases in substance use during pandemic, but also because it represents an extraordinary collaboration among technology industry professionals, university faculty, community clinical care, and individuals in recovery,” said Rebekah Hersch, interim associate vice president for research and innovation at Mason. “As with nearly all complex problems, it takes a multidisciplinary team to tackle the problem and make a real difference in the lives of so many people.”

Mason research on target to surpass $200 million for a record-breaking year

Colleen Rich — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 09:00:36 +0000

Mason research on target to surpass $200 million for a record-breaking year Colleen Rich Thu, 10/15/2020 - 05:00

Illustration by Joan Dall'Acqua/Creative Services

��AV anticipates reporting more than $200 million in sponsored research expenditures for fiscal year 2020, which would be an all-time high for the university and shows significant progress toward the university’s strategic goal of $225 million by 2024.

This is a 10% increase over 2019 when the university reported $186 million in sponsored research expenditures to the National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey.

The final numbers, which will be available in November, include funds provided by federal and state government entities, industry, nonprofit organizations and the university itself.

“Great research universities tackle the grand-challenge problems of our time. We call it research of consequence for a reason—we face serious consequences as a planet if we cannot solve our most pressing global challenges,” said Mason President Gregory Washington. “We have grown our research portfolio significantly in recent years as more entities seek out productive partnerships with the largest and most diverse public university in Virginia.”

“Mason has strategically pursued the goal of elevating research through supporting our community while they engage in high-impact research, scholarship and creative activities across all of our disciplines,” said Aurali Dade, interim vice president for research, innovation and economic impact. “The continued growth in expenditures—more than doubling since setting the goal in 2014—is very impressive and reflects the deep commitment and expertise of our faculty and their willingness to engage in new partnerships on emerging topics.”

Among the prestigious grants Mason has been awarded in fiscal year 2020 are:

Mason was awarded $15 million in grant funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to establish a Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) Coordinating and Translation Center. Mason joins 11 research institutions named to the JCOIN, which is part of the National Institutes of Health’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, an aggressive, trans-agency effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis. The center, led by University Professor Faye Taxman, will be responsible for the management of logistics, engagement with practitioners and other key stakeholders in the justice and behavioral health fields, and dissemination of products and key research findings.

A multidisciplinary team of Mason researchers is part of a groundbreaking approach funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that could change the face of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduate education in the future. Mason bioengineering professor Siddhartha Sikdar leads the team that has received a nearly $3 million NSF Research Traineeship grant to train more than 100 PhD students, including some with disabilities, to use state-of-the-art data analytic methods and wearable computing technologies based on novel transdisciplinary competencies, applications and practice curriculum.

The Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the planet, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the changes to come. With the support of a $3 million NSF grant, Mason engineering professors Elise Miller-Hooks and Celso Ferriera, Carter School professor Sara Cobb, and a team of multi-institutional researchers are diving into how melting ice in the Arctic will affect the people, habitats and social fabric of this remote region.

Mason researchers have also been on the front lines in the fight against the coronavirus. More than 100 Mason faculty and student researchers are doing their parts to help thwart the COVID-19 pandemic, inventing new diagnostic tools, as well as exploring promising therapies and vaccine delivery systems. The university received seven NSF Rapid Response Research grants designed to get researchers into the field and lab quicker than the traditional grant process.

Learn more about Mason research.