HERSHEY, Pa. — Two Penn State faculty have been awarded funding through the Consortium of Rural States 2024 multi-institutional pilot award program, which supports translational science projects that identify and resolve barriers to conducting translational research.
The Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) program, run by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), creates a network of medical research institutions collaborating to accelerate the translation of research into better patient care.
Seven CTSA institutions have teamed up to form the CORES, including Penn State. This award program encourages multi-institutional collaboration by funding innovative translational science research projects that involve two or more of these CTSA institutions.
The purpose of this award program is to promote multi-institutional collaboration across the CTSA consortium by funding innovative translational science research projects that involve two or more of these seven CTSA institutions.
The 2024 projects co-led by Penn State faculty are:
- “Leveraging causal genetic mechanisms to achieve generalizable polygenic prediction of health and disease in underrepresented populations” — This project is led by Xiang Zhu of the Department of Statistics and Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State; and Siming Zhao of the Department of Biomedical Data Science and Dartmouth Cancer Center at Dartmouth College. This research will focus on enhancing the transferability of polygenic predictions for health and disease across diverse populations, utilizing innovative causal modeling techniques.
- “Strengthening community coalitions and empowering public health professionals for translational and implementation science” This project is led by William Calo of the Departments of Public Health Sciences and of Family and Community Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine; and Prajakta Adsul, of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of New Mexico. The specific aims of this project are to improve public health professionals’ knowledge, intentions and capacity for the selection, adaptation and implementation of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) for cancer prevention and control with a focus on rural populations; and to develop an implementation plan for the selection, adaptation and implementation of EBIs for cancer prevention and control with four federally qualified health centers serving rural communities in New Mexico and Pennsylvania.