Population Health Sciences awards $275,000 in pilot grants to 11 projects

The Stanford Center for Population Sciences has funded 11 additional pilot projects in 2017, bringing the year’s total to 16. These grants support investigators whose work aims to improve the health of populations through health care system-based or community-based studies.

The grant-receiving projects and their principal investigators are:

Population health sciences

• “Design and development of a personal environmental exposure monitoring device” — Michael Snyder, PhD, professor of genetics.
• “Assessment of statins in understudied races and ethnicities” — Latha Palaniappan, MD, clinical professor of medicine.
• “Living laboratories in institutional food settings: Building a research model to help develop strategies for improving healthy food choices” — Christopher Gardner, PhD, professor of medicine.  
• “Improving personalized medicine through n-of-1 causal inference and predictive modeling” — Eric Daza, DrPH, postdoctoral scholar in heart disease prevention.
• “GapMap: A mobile surveillance system to map autism and gaps in autism services globally” — Dennis Wall, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics.
• “Quantifying individual genetic risk in diverse populations” — Laramie Duncan, PhD, instructor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
• “Assay development for the study of skin flora and allergy in infants” — Julie Parsonnet, MD, professor of medicine and of health research and policy.
• “Telomere length changes as a marker of chronic disease risk among children participating in lifestyle behavior change” —  Thomas Robinson, MD, MPH, professor of pediatrics and of medicine.

Community engagement

• “Pediatrics and education: A transdisciplinary approach to improve school readiness” — Lisa Chamberlain, MD, MPH, associate professor of pediatrics.
• “Improving food insecurity screening and referral to healthy food resources in a community clinic population in San Mateo County” — Michelle Hauser, MD, postdoctoral scholar, and Christopher Gardner, PhD, professor of medicine.
• “Developing and evaluating a K-drama precision mental health curriculum among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders” — Van Ta Park, PhD, MPH, associate professor of health science and recreation at San Jose State University, and Mildred Cho, PhD, professor of pediatrics.

These pilot grants are administered by Spectrum (the Stanford Center for Clinical and Translational Research and Education) and the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. Primary funding comes from Spectrum’s $45.3 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (grant UL1TR001085) from the National Institutes of Health.

The proposal deadline for next year’s Spectrum pilot grants will be late in 2017. For more information, visit https://spectrum.stanford.edu/pilot-grants--3