Former Wright Center KL2 Mentored Career Development Scholar among 2019’s Blick Scholars
By Anne Dreyfuss
VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research
As a Wright Center KL2 Mentored Career Development Scholar, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine associate professor April Kimmel, Ph.D., researched HIV care delivery models and access to care in the South. Among her findings was the discovery that a third of the population she studied had to travel more than an hour to receive comprehensive HIV treatment
“My research is focused on improving equity in access to HIV care,” Kimmel said. “The KL2 award from the Wright Center supported dedicated time for me to pursue additional training and conduct critical foundational work related to my domestic research agenda. It set the stage for my professional development and career independence.”
The KL2 program provides early-career researchers with protected time to help their findings benefit human health more quickly. It also provides mentorship and career development opportunities to help researchers like Kimmel become successful, independent translational scientists.
After completing the three-year KL2 program in 2016, Kimmel submitted a grant application to the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities that was based upon her Wright Center-supported research. She was awarded a four-year R01 by NIMHD to expand her KL2 studies and examine the influence of structural barriers on the quality of HIV care and population health in the U.S. south. “The early career training supported by the KL2 has resulted in multiple extramural federal research grants and important contributions to knowledge on the role of structural barriers in HIV care in the U.S.,” Kimmel said.
In recognition of her achievements, the VCU Office of the Vice President for Health Sciences appointed Kimmel as one of four 2019 Blick Scholars. Created with a $2 million bequest from the George and Lavinia Blick Research Fund, the Blick Scholars Program endowment is awarded every four years to medical researchers on the MCV Campus. The award recognizes scholars with documented growth toward national prominence, a record of external research funding, and collaborative scholarship. “Rather than recognizing a specific project, the program acknowledges an overall trajectory of scholarship growth,” Kimmel said.
Through the Blick Scholars Program, Kimmel will receive an annual award of approximately $25,000 a year (based on market performance) to support her research for four years. She will apply the funding toward studying how structural barriers to HIV care – such as geographic accessibility and physicians payment rates – influence quality of care and how policy changes can improve inequities in the impact of the barriers on quality of care. Internationally, she will work toward projecting how different HIV clinical policies impact health outcomes and new HIV infections over time. She will also study the cost-effectiveness of various clinical policies. “My goal is to improve access to HIV care in very resource-limited settings,” she said.
Categories Funding, Health Equity, KL2, Research