Affiliates in Action – Advancing personal, public, and planetary health
IHSI affiliates advance our mission to address personal, public, and planetary health challenges. Through innovative research, meaningful partnerships, community engagement, and a commitment to health equity, read below to learn how Illinois researchers are making a positive impact across campus and beyond.
Prof. Zeynep Madak-Erdogan is using multiomics to better understand the relationship between disparities in breast cancer survival rates and the area deprivation index (ADI), a measure of neighborhood deprivation using census-based data to quantify variables like income, housing quality, education, and employment.
Prof. Halil Kilicoglu and his team are training artificial intelligence (AI) tools to spot when publications featuring research from randomized, controlled clinical trials are missing key information. Using the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s NSF-funded Bridges-2 system, their goal is to produce an open-source AI tool that authors and journals can use to catch these mistakes and better plan, conduct, and report the results of clinical trials.
“Clinical trials are considered the best type of evidence for clinical care. If a drug is going to be used for a disease … it needs to be shown that it’s safe and it’s effective … But there are a lot of problems with the publications of clinical trials. They often don’t have enough details. They’re not transparent about what exactly has been done and how, so we have trouble assessing how rigorous their evidence is.”
Prof. Adrienne Antonson and colleagues have published groundbreaking research showing for the first time that severe flu infection in pregnant mice leads to breakdown in placental and brain barriers, affecting fetal brain development.
"Our results really help confirm the idea that there's an infection or pathology severity threshold, where you need to get sick enough before these things to really take hold. In pregnant people, getting a flu shot can reduce severe outcomes, so please get vaccinated.”
Prof. Nidia Ruedas-Gracia has published research examining the effects of ethnic and racial discrimination on sleep health among Asian American college students in Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation.
"Recognizing racial discrimination as a critical social determinant of health, our findings contribute to the growing body of literature that elucidates how discrimination can 'get under the skin,' affecting physiological processes such as sleep health, particularly for Asian American college students."
Can we measure pain in the postpartum brain? Prof. Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo recently led a team of collaborators, including fellow IHSI Affiliate Dr. Hillary Schwarb and former Community-Academic Scholar Michelle Nutlis to explore how fMRI could help us better understand how postpartum depression changes the pain experience.
Congratulations to new IHSI affiliate Prof. Cherie Avent, who was honored with the Marcia Guttentag Promising New Evaluator Award from the American Evaluation Association, recognizing her commitment to centering communities and using evaluation as a tool for social justice.
"Dr. Guttentag's scholarship highlighted the need for shifting towards a focus on context and the inclusion of diverse perspectives and methods, which are key ideas that shape my scholarship, practice, and teaching. This award reinforces my commitment to centering communities, honoring their lived experiences, and using evaluation as a tool for illuminating inequities and promoting meaningful impact that advances social justice."
Dr. Rebecca Smith has published a new analysis of the distribution of three potentially harmful tick species in Illinois. The study identifies "regions of the state with higher numbers of these ticks and, therefore, at greater risk of infection with multiple tick-borne diseases."
Prof. Leanne Knobloch collaborated with psychologists from the Naval Health Research Center to on research finding “Few military spouses use formal support services during, after deployment.”
“Most of the literature looks at perceptions of support by asking people, ‘If you needed something, would you have someone in your life who could provide it for you?’ We wanted to take a different route and ask military spouses about the support that they actually received and used to manage stressors during deployment and reintegration.”
Prof. Rachel Hoopsick and her team’s findings on nitrous oxide misuse have been gaining traction. The team’s findings were covered in a recent issue of Pscyhology Today
Prof. Hoopsick also urges the public to get vaccinated and support your local health departments in an opinion piece in The Fulcrum.
"When public health is working, 'nothing' happens: disease and death are prevented, and people go about their lives without thinking about what might have been.
That invisibility is part of what made this country’s public health system a fragile and susceptible target. When administrations cut back on public health, the consequences only become visible after the damage is done."
Prof. Brenda Wilson recently discussed the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology’s new MCB + Data Science major. Wilson who serves as the school’s associate director of undergraduate education in the School of MCB.
“These core courses, taken during a student’s first two years in their program, set the stage for students to take more advanced courses, as well as engage in research experiences in faculty labs.”