News from Our Office
Azeesat Babajide receives DICP Faculty Fellowship
Azeesat Babajide, one of the PRO's clinician researchers, has received a Diversity Inclusion and Community Partnership (DICP) Faculty Fellowship for 2023-2024. This award allows faculty to develop as researchers by providing release time from clinical work to conduct research. Azeesat's project is titled "Identifying Barriers and Facilitators to Mental Health Care Transitions for Young Adults in a Safety Net System." With this project, she hopes to better understand the transition for minoritized populations receiving mental health care from young adulthood to adulthood. This research will increase understanding of how to facilitate this transition for youth and help to develop interventions to support these individuals.
Gili Grunfeld Joins the Psychosis Research Team
Gil (Gili) Grunfeld, MSc, MA, a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at Boston University, has joined the Psychosis research team at Cambridge Health Alliance as a PI on a mixed-methods project at the Recovery in Shared Experiences (RISE) Program at CHA, where she is investigating the interaction between daily experiences of loneliness and early psychosis symptom course. Gili has had a recent publication in JAMA Psychiatry based on research at the Prevention and Early Intervention Program for Psychosis- Montréal (PEPP-Montréal) and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute focused on the thematic content of psychosis symptoms in the first-episode population. To read this article, click here.
Mena Ads receives Weil Foundation Funding
Mena Ads has received funding from the Weil Foundation to support the implementation of an innovative, pilot intervention for underserved, minoritized children and adolescents that addresses pediatric obesity and behavioral health using an interdisciplinary approach in primary care. This quality improvement project aligns with the mission of the Weil foundation to increase access to psychological services for a traditionally underserved, young BIPOC population. This award builds on Mena's prior work to adapt childhood obesity populations to include more behavioral health content, and will allow for outreach and implementation among a broader proportion of CHA patients.
Vee Faller receives funding from ABPN
Dr. Vee Faller has recently received funding from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology for a project entitled "Bias at the Bedside 2.0: Empowering Psychiatric Educators to Respond to Biased Comments in the Teaching Hospital." This project tests the impact of a role-play based workshop on trainees’ skills related to and attitudes toward addressing incidents of bias in the teaching hospital setting. The workshop helps participants practice responding to overt derogatory comments and microaggressions in real time. Dr. Faller will also develop a robust “Train the Trainer” program to assist other psychiatry training programs in incorporating these teaching methods into their curriculum.
Emily Wilner leads CHA site for PCORI Project SUCCESS
Emily Wilner, PsyD, is the site Principal Investigator at CHA for the PCORI-funded project - Schizophrenia: Understanding and Comparing Cognitive Enhancement and Social Skills training (Project SUCCESS). This project aims to compare the effectiveness of two different evidence-based interventions to help improve functioning of individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum illness. There are 19 different mental health service sites included in this project, and each is randomly assigned one of two different types of intervention. As the CHA site PI, Dr. Wilner oversees all components of the delivery of the interventions to participants, collaborating with the principal investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Opportunities and Information
Columbia Skills for Health and Research Professionals Trainings
Check out some of the trainings offered by Columbia in a variety of areas here. Some topics that are covered include NIH grant writing, statistical analysis with missing data, and the business of research for PIs. Please reach out with any questions!
Longwood Medical Area Research Data Management Working Group Newsletter
Looking for trainings and information about data collection and management? Take a look at this calendar for dates of useful trainings coming up in the fall! They are offering trainings that focus on how to manage data at all phases of research.