Workshop

This workshop series is intended to support investigators with the submission of an R21 application. The workshops are open to all interested individuals at the four affiliated institutions. The six workshops are sequential in regard to topics covered and the development of the R21. Attendance at the complete series is recommended for optimal learning and application of the workshop content. However, for individuals unable to commit to the full series, each workshop will be offered as a freestanding session.

Participants who submit drafts of sections of their grant proposals will receive individualized feedback from established CDUHR investigators.

This will be an introduction to the workshop series. Dr. Guilamo-Ramos will provide an overview of NIH funding mechanisms, NIH/OAR funding priorities, grant proposal sections and timeline for developing an R21 proposal.

Vincent Guilamo-Ramos is a Professor of Social Work and the Global Institute of Public Health and the Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health at New York University Silver School of Social Work (www.clafh.org). Dr. Guilamo-Ramos is a leading expert on the role of families in promoting adolescent health, with a focus on preventing HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancies among Latino and African American youth. His work intersects with the fields of social work, public health, and nursing. He is among the core developers of an evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention intervention, Families Talking Together (FTT), which was recognized by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as meeting rigorous review criteria for strong evidence of effectiveness among thousands of programs that were evaluated.

Discuss strategies for developing the specific aims section of an R21, significance and innovation.

Sherry Deren is the co-director of the NIDA-funded P30 Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR), and is associate director of the CDUHR Pilot Projects and Mentoring Core. Dr. Deren is a social psychologist, and has been Principal Investigator for many NIDA-funded research projects related to drug use and HIV. Her recent research interests have included multi-disciplinary studies on the impact of drug injection on immune activation, and multi-level influences on HIV risk behaviors among Puerto Rican drug users in Puerto Rico and NYC. Dr. Deren is a co-founder and steering committee member of the New York HIV Research Centers Consortium, comprised of over 25 HIV Research Centers in the New York tri-State area, and serves on the scientific advisory boards of several HIV-related research centers. She has served on numerous NIH research review committees, and is an author of over 150 articles related to HIV/AIDS among high-risk substance users.

Victoria Vaughan Dickson is an Associate Professor in the NYU Meyers College of Nursing with extensive clinical and research experience in cardiovascular and occupational health nursing. Dr. Dickson is recognized as an international expert in qualitative research techniques and mixed methods research and has conducted training to interdisciplinary teams locally, nationally and internationally. Her research program focuses on investigating the bio-behavioral influences on self-care in patients with cardiovascular disease including heart failure and multiple comorbidity; and evaluating the effectiveness of self-care interventions on health outcomes. Her work has led to an improved understanding of the sociocultural influences of self-care among vulnerable populations including older workers, women, and ethnic minority groups; and the development of innovative theory-based interventions. Dr. Dickson holds a clinical appointment as an advanced practice nurse in the division of cardiology at the NYU Langone Medical Center and the Bellevue Hospital, and is co-director of the NIH-funded NYU School of Medicine CTSA Scholars Program.

Theory serves as the structure and support for all aspects of your grant proposal and a clearly articulated theoretical framework significantly strengthens your application. This presentation will focus on individual and interpersonal level theories and provide guidance on the ways in which theory serves as a guide for the design of your study as well as tips for integrating your theoretical model into the components of an NIH application.

Noelle Leonard is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Meyers College of Nursing and an Associate Director in the Transdisciplinary Research Methods (TRM) Core. Her expertise is designing, implementing, evaluating, and disseminating behavioral interventions for highly vulnerable adults, adolescents, and families including those who are infected with, or at-risk for, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, as well as those at risk for or dealing with issues related to substance use, and other mental health and behavioral problems.  In her role on the TRM core, she assists CDUHR affiliated investigators who are planning or conducting intervention studies and participate in several activities of the Pilot Projects and Mentoring core including serving as mentors for junior investigators who developing and conducting CDUHR-funded pilot projects.

Graduate training and the theory of science rarely discuss how to get good ideas. Some ideas, of course, are “next steps” from projects you already have been working on, but often these are not terribly innovative. And for new researchers, they often reflect your mentor’s enthusiasm rather than your own. This session will present some of the ways Dr. Friedman goes about seeking good research ideas that seem worth his time to conduct.

Samuel Friedman has worked on research concerning people who use drugs and HIV since 1983. During this time, he has written widely on related epidemiology and prevention topics. His work has contributed substantially to what we know about drug users’ social networks and their relations to HIV epidemics; to our understanding of macro-social epidemiology of drug use and its associated diseases; to the theory and practice of drug users’ organizations and their efforts to reduce the spread of HIV and other infections among them; to efforts to prevent HIV transmission by drug users and others who have recently become infected; and to our understanding of how HIV and other epidemics among people who used drugs do or do not spread to non-users in their communities.

Discuss how to effectively develop the research methods section of an R21 application, and define appropriate developmental and exploratory research studies that are consistent with the scope of an R21.

Marya Gwadz is a licensed clinical psychologist and Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Meyers College of Nursing. Dr. Gwadz is the Director of the Transdisciplinary Research Methods Core of the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research, in which she has played a leadership role since 2005. The main focus of Dr. Gwadz’s research is the development and evaluation of potent, innovative, multi-level culturally targeted interventions to address racial/ethnic disparities in HIV/AIDS. Her work with vulnerable populations spans over two decades and has focused on vulnerable sub-groups such as runaway/homeless youth, young men who have sex with men (YMSM), heterosexuals at high risk for HIV, substance-using populations, low socioeconomic status populations, and persons of color living with HIV/AIDS.

Holly Hagan trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist with an emphasis on methods to study disease causation and control. Her research has addressed the etiology, epidemiology, natural history, prevention and treatment of blood-borne and sexually transmitted infections in key populations in general and among people who use drugs (PWUD) in particular. She is skilled in research synthesis (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) and the methods of implementation science. She has designed and led a number of large observational and experimental studies related to blood-borne viral infections in PWUD, men who have sex with men (MSM), and heterosexuals at high risk of HIV. Dr. Hagan is a member of the WHO Global Burden of Disease Study Diseases and Injuries Group, she served on the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Prevention and Control of Viral Hepatitis in the United States, and have been an advisor to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC, and the Canadian Institutes of Health on national programs to detect, diagnose and treat HCV infections.

Address the development of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods analytic strategies for an R21 application.

Charles Cleland is a quantitative psychologist and biostatistician with more than ten years of experience in the field of public health research. His methodological interests include longitudinal data analysis, meta­-analysis, respondent­ driven sampling, and multilevel modeling. His substantive research interests include health disparities, particularly in the areas of substance use and infectious disease.

Victoria Vaughan Dickson is an Associate Professor in the NYU Meyers College of Nursing with extensive clinical and research experience in cardiovascular and occupational health nursing. Dr. Dickson is recognized as an international expert in qualitative research techniques and mixed methods research and has conducted training to interdisciplinary teams locally, nationally and internationally. Her research program focuses on investigating the bio-behavioral influences on self-care in patients with cardiovascular disease including heart failure and multiple comorbidity; and evaluating the effectiveness of self-care interventions on health outcomes. Her work has led to an improved understanding of the sociocultural influences of self-care among vulnerable populations including older workers, women, and ethnic minority groups; and the development of innovative theory-based interventions. Dr. Dickson holds a clinical appointment as an advanced practice nurse in the division of cardiology at the NYU Langone Medical Center and the Bellevue Hospital, and is co-director of the NIH-funded NYU School of Medicine CTSA Scholars Program.

Discuss research ethics, protection of human subjects, including the inclusion of women and minorities, the inclusion of children, and planned enrollment table for an R21 proposal. How to finalize the R21 application including the abstract, project narrative (PHRS), budget and budget justification, facilities and resources, biosketches, etc.

Danielle Ompad is the Deputy Director for CDUHR and Director of CDUHR’s Dissemination & Implementation Core.  She is also an Associate Professor at NYU’s College of Global Public Health.  Dr. Ompad is an infectious disease epidemiologist with extensive experience in design, conduct, and analysis of community-based cross-sectional and prospective studies.  Her research interests include illicit substance use, sexual risk behaviors, infectious diseases (e.g., HIV, HBV, HCV, HSV, and HPV), adult access to vaccines, and urban health.  She has studied HIV risk, and social determinants of that risk, among drug using populations in the US (Baltimore and New York, in particular), Ukraine, and Russia.  Dr. Ompad was a member of the Synergy Circle of the Knowledge Network on Urban Settings, a network created by WHO’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health to consider the role of urbanization in health outcomes. She has also been a consultant to the WHO and PAHO on urban health issues. She was a member of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Roundtable for Urban Living Environment Research (RULER) group. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Urban Health and former secretary for the International Society for Urban Health.

Michele Shedlin is a tenured, full professor in the NYU College of Nursing where she teaches qualitative research and health disparities. She is a medical anthropologist, with a strong track record of completed and ongoing NIH funded HIV and substance abuse research with vulnerable and marginalized populations. She has worked extensively in research and training in Latin America, Central Europe and Hispanic US communities with government, universities and NGOs for over three decades. Dr. Shedlin has focused research on the acceptability of heath care and on HIV risk behavior since the onset of the epidemic. One of her responsibilities was serving as Co-Director of the NIH Hispanic Health Disparities Research Center at the University of Texas (UTEP) where she began research on ARV adherence among Mexican-origin patients, and has recently completed a study of  substance abuse and HIV risk among Colombian  refugees in Ecuador.