A Legacy of Global Impact<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nWhile Olex does not hold a faculty title, her scholarly and policy impact is substantial. Over the course of her career, she co-authored 66 peer-reviewed publications and a book chapter. Her tenure at the Wright Center alone saw the publication of 57 papers, including 8 on which she served as first author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her impact extends beyond academic papers and into the realm of international health policy through her work with the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C).<\/a> Joining the initiative at its inception in 2020, Olex was a core contributor to an unprecedented effort across the CTSA network to harmonize billions of rows of EHR data into a single, massive dataset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n“In the early days of COVID, everyone had this aspiration to do something to help,” says Evan French, M.S., Data Team Manager at the Wright Center. “Amy jumped into N3C with both feet in Spring 2020 and immediately began organizing a team of clinicians, informaticists, and statisticians around the specific goal of understanding how COVID was affecting some of the most clinically vulnerable populations.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This initiative resulted in what French describes as a “prolific string of publications.” As a leader of the Immunocompromised and Suppressed Domain Team<\/a>, Olex served as a vital \u201cdoor opener\u201d\u2014training researchers to access and navigate the enclave while managing the underlying data infrastructure. Though she often worked as a facilitator rather than a lead author, her contributions were so foundational that she is acknowledged as a \u201ccore contributor\u201d on nearly every paper the N3C produced. That work has had measurable global reach: N3C research she supported has been cited in policy documents across six countries, informing the guidelines of organizations including the United Nations<\/a> and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Harrell Collaboration: A VCU First in PDX Innovation<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nCloser to home, Olex identifies her decade-long collaboration with Chuck Harrell, Ph.D.,<\/a> an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology, as one of her most meaningful contributions to VCU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\")
Chuck Harrell, Ph.D. (center), and members of the Harrell lab<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n“I’ve been working with Chuck for 11 years. I\u2019ve been at the Wright Center for 12.” Olex reflects. “He was one of my very first collaborators.” Harrell\u2019s lab specializes in breast cancer research<\/a>, specifically utilizing Patient-Derived Xenograft (PDX) models\u2014human tumor cells grown in immune-suppressed mice.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOlex\u2019s role in Harrell\u2019s research was central to a major technical hurdle: when tumor tissue is grown in a mouse, the resulting genetic data is a messy mix of both species. “The pipelines that I developed for Chuck were the first at VCU to be able to bioinformatically and computationally separate human and mouse genetic material,” she explained at a recent Wright Center presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When asked to describe her impact on his research lab, Harrell was effusive. He recalled recognizing Olex\u2019s value almost immediately after joining the VCU faculty\u2014someone who would become, in his words, a critical member of his research team. \u201cWhile initially her role was to perform bioinformatic analyses,\u201d Harrell said, \u201cshe quickly became an unofficial co-mentor to nearly all of the students that have been part of my lab for the past decade.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2023, a NCI U54 grant expanded the collaboration further, broadening PDX development across multiple cancer types and growing Olex\u2019s role to encompass the full range of genomic and proteomic data generated by the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Summing up her overall contribution, he was direct: “Amy was a huge part in the success of our group. She contributed to 13 publications, over $10 million in research funding from our team, and directly contributed to 10 PhD thesis projects.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read More: Massey researchers first to develop comprehensive models of “seeds and soil” as a means to combat breast cancer metastasis<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nCircling Back: The Road to the Ph.D.<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nWhile Olex was busy building these high-level pipelines for VCU investigators, she was also quietly advancing her own academic journey. In 2016, she enrolled in VCU’s Computer Science Ph.D. program, taking one class per semester while maintaining her full-time role at the Wright Center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She worked with her dissertation advisor, Bridget McInnes, Ph.D.,<\/a> who understood that for a working mother and senior scientist, the Ph.D. was \u201cthe extra thing, not the primary thing.\u201d McInnes\u2019s focus on natural language processing allowed Olex to build bridges between computer science and clinical applications\u2014a theme that has defined her entire career.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCompleting a doctorate while working full-time required extraordinary discipline. Olex frequently spent her weekends at the local skating rink, typing away on her dissertation while her children skated laps. She finished in six years\u2014faster than her own projection\u2014and along the way found herself at a technological frontier: when she began her dissertation work, Google\u2019s BERT<\/a>\u2014now recognized as the first large language model to reshape the field\u2014had just been released in 2017. Olex was among the earliest researchers to work with it, fine-tuning those early models for clinical text applications years before \u201cLLM\u201d entered everyday vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOlex the Educator: Cultivating a Bioinformatics Community<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nThis breadth of experience\u2014from data management to cutting-edge natural language processing\u2014informed her second great contribution to VCU: her role as an educator. Shortly after joining the Wright Center, Olex was tasked with helping investigators and researchers understand how bioinformatics could drive drug discovery and precision medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2017, Olex launched the “Bioinformatics 101”<\/a> seminar series, offering free sessions to anyone\u2014inside or outside VCU\u2014for five years, working to saturate the campus with bioinformatics literacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOlex eventually distilled her cumulative expertise into CCTR 691<\/strong><\/a>, a comprehensive three-credit course for clinical and translational science students that distills her 12 years at the Wright Center into an immediately applicable curriculum.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe impact of the course is best seen through the feedback of her students. \u201cI started this course without any understanding of informatics at all, and now feel like I could listen to a lecture or read a paper and understand the vocabulary, concepts, and the point,\u201d wrote one student in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Olex, making complex topics approachable is the ultimate goal. \u201cI\u2019m not just teaching theory,\u201d she says. \u201cI teach specific skills that you can apply immediately to your work. I\u2019m focused on what is going to be an immediate value add to your workflow today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the Crossroads: A Philosophy of Translational Science<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nThroughout her career, Olex has been most at home at the crossroads of disciplines\u2014between computer science and clinical medicine, between data infrastructure and research outcomes, between the specialist\u2019s deep knowledge and the generalist\u2019s ability to communicate across silos. The Wright Center, she says, was the place where she got to live that instinct at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTranslational research to me is trying to understand where the other person is coming from, what\u2019s important to them, what their priorities are\u2014and then taking what\u2019s important to me and folding it into their paradigm,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t know of anywhere else where I would have been able to get all of that experience in one job. The Wright Center really put me in a unique position.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Comes Next: Staying in the VCU Family<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nThe move to Stravitz-Sanyal is about the opportunity to build from the ground up once again. Olex spent years facilitating other people’s research; now, she will be architecting the multimodal bioinformatics infrastructure for a young institute with global ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I\u2019m not disappearing,” Olex says. “I think a lot of the stuff that I\u2019ll be building at Stravitz-Sanyal will be applicable beyond and have an impact on VCU as a whole. You have all shaped my career, and I’m so grateful that you primed me for this new challenge.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wright Center Director F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., offered his own send-off: \u201cThank you, Amy, for your tireless commitment to your discipline, but also to your commitment to the whole spectrum of translational science. Your work raised the bar for our center every day. We will miss you and wish you all the best.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Please join us in thanking Amy Olex, Ph.D., for her extraordinary service, her mentorship, and her unwavering commitment to the VCU research community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After 12 years, 57 publications, and a hand in securing millions in research funding, Amy Olex, Ph.D., is leaving the Wright Center \u2014 but not VCU. Her bioinformatics pipelines powered landmark cancer research, her COVID data work shaped health policy across six countries, and her teaching, from the “Bioinformatics 101” seminar series to a graduate course still running today, brought hundreds of researchers into the fold. “I don’t know of anywhere else where I would have been able to get all of that experience in one job,” she says. “The Wright Center really put me in a unique position.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,68,16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-science","category-impact","category-research","category-staff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3543,"date":"2026-05-07T20:47:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3543"},"modified":"2026-05-11T01:54:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T01:54:21","slug":"wright-center-graduate-students-win-honors-at-vcus-20th-annual-womens-health-research-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/05\/07\/wright-center-graduate-students-win-honors-at-vcus-20th-annual-womens-health-research-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Wright Center Graduate Students Win Honors at VCU\u2019s 20th Annual Women\u2019s Health Research Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Two graduate students from the VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research<\/a> were among the top honorees at the 20th Annual Women\u2019s Health Research Day<\/a>. The event, hosted by the VCU Institute for Women\u2019s Health on April 28, 2026, centered on the theme “Midlife Matters: Integrating Menopause Research, Innovation, and Impact.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nA Double Win for Breast Cancer Research<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nGowtami Aishwarya Panguluri, a Ph.D. student at the Wright Center, achieved a rare “double win,” taking home both the Basic Sciences Research Best Poster Award<\/strong> and the Emerging Investigator Research Award<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPanguluri\u2019s research, titled “Pubertal AGE exposure reprograms mammary fibroblasts through RAGE-MYC signaling: Implications for Women’s Breast Cancer Risk,”<\/em> explores how early-life dietary exposures to Advanced Glycation End Products can mechanistically influence long-term Breast Cancer risk. <\/p>\n\n\n\nPanguluri (left) with Victoria Findlay, Ph.D. (right)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWorking under the mentorship of Victoria Findlay, Ph.D., Panguluri\u2019s study bridges the gap between basic molecular biology and population-level health outcomes. Her poster emphasizes mammary fibroblasts, structural support cells in breast tissue, as the site where AGE exposure leaves a lasting biological imprint. She shows that these cells, once exposed to AGEs, retain an activated state and actively encourage cancer-related cell movement through a receptor called RAGE (the cellular “docking station” that AGEs bind to in order to exert their effects). Critically, she identifies MYC, a gene known to drive cancer growth, as a key downstream player in this process, required for AGE-exposed fibroblasts to promote the migration and invasion of epithelial cells, the type that give rise to most breast cancers. She also validated these findings in an animal model, demonstrating that stromal RAGE, the version of this receptor found in the tissue surrounding cells, is required for tumor development in the mammary gland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Two targets, one pathway,” Panguluri said. “Stromal RAGE shapes the pro-tumorigenic microenvironment, and MYC is the downstream effector required for fibroblast-driven epithelial migration with dietary AGEs as a modifiable exposure, opening the door to intercepting breast cancer risk before a tumor ever forms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Building Bridges with Big Data<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nNour Abosamak, MD, a Ph.D. student mentored by Wright Center Director of Health Informatics Tamas Gal, Ph.D., received the Building Bridges in Interdisciplinary Women\u2019s Health Research Award<\/strong>, given to the poster that best demonstrates interdisciplinary collaboration in women\u2019s health research.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe award-winning poster, “Hip Replacement & Postoperative Depressive Disorders: A 16-year Retrospective Cohort Study using Real-world Data,”<\/em> utilized the power of the Wright Center\u2019s TriNetX research network to analyze over 115 million patient records. narrowing the scope to 22,499 surgical patients aged 60 and older, the team uncovered an increased risk of major depressive disorder among those who underwent hip replacement.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKey Findings included:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n- Adults 60 and older undergoing hip replacement face a 46.7% higher risk<\/strong> of recurrent major depressive disorder.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Female patients showed a significantly higher prevalence of postoperative depression compared to males.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
“This is a prime example of the utility of TriNetX,” Gal said. “By leveraging standardized, de-identified electronic health records from healthcare organizations, our students can uncover significant health disparities and clinical risks that might otherwise remain hidden in smaller datasets.”<\/p>\n\n\n
\nSimone Intriago Tito, (left) and Nour Abosamak, MD (right)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe study was the result of a collaboration between two Wright Center graduate students. The project was initiated by Simone Intriago Tito, a first-year Clinical and Translational Sciences (CTS) doctoral student, during her research rotation with Gretchen Neigh, Ph.D., MBA. Seeking to expand the study’s scope through advanced informatics, Intriago Tito reached out to Abosamak, whose expertise in TriNetX and bioanalytics were invaluable throughout the project. Their collaboration\u2014bridging initial clinical inquiry with complex data analysis\u2014was so integrated that both are expected to serve as co-first authors on the forthcoming manuscript. The interdisciplinary project also included contributors from the Dept. of Neuroscience and Anatomy, the VCU College of Engineering, and the Wright Center\u2019s Collaborative Advance Research Imaging (CARI) program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mentorship and the Future of Women\u2019s Health<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nGretchen Neigh, Ph.D., MBA, the Wright Center\u2019s director of education and mentoring, noted that the success of these students reflects the center’s commitment to fostering well-rounded investigators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Seeing our students recognized at this level is a testament to the rigorous, collaborative environment we strive to create at the Wright Center,” she said. Neigh, who is also the director of translational research for the Institute of Women\u2019s Health, continued, “Our students are demonstrating how collaborative, interdisciplinary translational science can tackle complex issues in women\u2019s health, from the cellular level to large-scale population health.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About Women\u2019s Health Research Day<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nNow in its 20th year, Women\u2019s Health Research Day is a premier symposium at VCU designed to celebrate and promote research activities dedicated to the health of women. The 2026 event featured a symposium at the Larrick Student Center on the MCV Campus, providing a platform for students, faculty, and clinicians to share a diverse array of research spanning the spectrum of women’s health throughout the lifespan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more information on the Wright Center\u2019s training and informatics resources, visit cctr.vcu.edu<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two graduate students from the VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research were among the top honorees at the 20th Annual Women\u2019s Health Research Day. The event, hosted by the VCU Institute for Women\u2019s Health on April 28, 2026, centered on the theme “Midlife Matters: Integrating Menopause Research, Innovation, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-mentorship","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3538,"date":"2026-05-06T08:28:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T08:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3538"},"modified":"2026-05-13T01:50:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T01:50:33","slug":"how-a-wright-center-kl2-scholar-became-a-national-leader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/05\/06\/how-a-wright-center-kl2-scholar-became-a-national-leader\/","title":{"rendered":"From Richmond to Philadelphia: how a Wright Center KL2 scholar became a national leader in periodontal research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Now a leader at the University of Pennsylvania, S. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D. continues to carry the lessons and community of VCU\u2019s Wright Center in her heart.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen S. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D., returned to VCU’s School of Dentistry<\/a> in spring 2025 to deliver the keynote address at the School of Dentistry\u2019s Research Day<\/a>, she found herself unexpectedly emotional. It had been exactly two decades since she first walked through those doors as a new faculty member \u2014 a clinician-scientist balancing the competing demands of clinical care, laboratory research, and raising two young children while carving out a place in academia as an immigrant. The path forward was anything but certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n“It was very emotional to come back,” she recalled. “I always had very good memories. I love VCU.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, Sahingur serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Student Research<\/a> at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Dental Medicine, where she also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Periodontics. She is a Diplomate of the American Board of Periodontology, Fellow of The Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine\u00ae (ELAM\u00ae) program<\/a> and a widely published researcher whose work has appeared in the field’s most prestigious journals with several papers making the covers of those publications. But in tracing the arc of her career, she returns again and again to her time at VCU’s C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research, where she was a KL2 Scholar from 2013 to 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n“The Wright Center is always very close to my heart,” she said. “It\u2019s not only about my academic career, but also personally. I always had a very positive relationship there; the mentorship, the friendship, and the camaraderie shaped my career and touched me both personally and professionally.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Bridge Between Bench and Bedside<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe KL2 program \u2014 similar to the K12 award the Wright Center administers today \u2014 is funded by the National Institutes of Health through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). It provides early-career faculty with protected research time, salary support, and mentorship, all with the goal of helping young clinician-scientists cross the difficult gap between promising junior researcher and independently funded investigator. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2013, Sahingur made a big leap forward in crossing that gap. She was an inaugural recipient<\/a> of the Wright Center’s Endowment Fund<\/a> and that same year, she was awarded the KL2 grant<\/a>, providing critical funding and support at a pivotal moment in her career.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFor Sahingur, the timing was critical. “It is always tough to be a clinician-scientist in a clinical department; you are essentially divided into two parts,” she said. “You can\u2019t be 100% in the clinic with your colleagues, but you also cannot be in the lab 100% of the time like our PhD colleagues.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The awards through the Wright Center changed that equation. The grants gave her protected time away from some departmental responsibilities, funding to hire a postdoctoral researcher, and \u2014 perhaps most importantly \u2014 the institutional signal that her work was worth believing in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This K award helped me continue pushing,” she said, recalling the early frustrations common to junior faculty. “It gave me an incentive to know that people believed in me. I’m not alone in this.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two years after completing her KL2, she was awarded a $1.9 million NIH R01 grant<\/a> \u2014 becoming the first Wright Center KL2 Scholar to receive a Research Project Grant from the NIH. A second grant of nearly $2 million followed soon after<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\nBuilding Bridges Across Disciplines<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nBeyond the funding and protected time, Sahingur emphasizes the community that the Wright Center built \u2014 the cross-disciplinary relationships that, she says, fundamentally changed how she approaches science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I was very fortunate to be with people who really cared and truly wanted to collaborate,” she said. Those connections led to joint grant proposals spanning the medical school, dental school, and engineering, even if some of those early efforts weren’t immediately funded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“You learn how to communicate, how to carry yourself, and how to be open to the ideas of others,” she said. “You learn to listen and collegially come up with a final product. Even when we didn’t agree, navigating those situations was important for building my career.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those relationships didn’t end when Sahingur left Richmond. She is still in touch and collaborating with colleagues from various schools at VCU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following the Data: From Oral Inflammation to Cellular Aging<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nAt VCU, Sahingur’s research centered on understanding the immune and inflammatory pathways that drive periodontitis \u2014 a chronic form of gum disease affecting nearly half of American adults. Periodontitis is not just a dental issue \u2013 it is linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, pregnancy complications and neurological and liver diseases. Her early NIH-funded work focused on TLR9, an immune receptor that, when activated by oral microbial DNA, can trigger runaway inflammation and bone loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the years since, her research has followed the data \u2014 sometimes to unexpected places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I\u2019ve been following the data and staying open-minded,” she said. “And stunned, honestly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nS. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D. (Photo by Penn Dental)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThat path has led her to one of biomedical research’s most exciting new frontiers: cellular senescence<\/a>, the process by which damaged cells stop dividing but linger in tissues, quietly stoking inflammation. In aging populations, these so-called “ghost cells” (also known as zombie cells) accumulate faster than the immune system can clear them, accelerating tissue dysfunction \u2014 including in the gums and surrounding bone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cIt doesn\u2019t take many dysfunctional cells to disrupt the entire environment\u2014it\u2019s a bit like a few disruptive elements in an otherwise healthy system. Even in small numbers, they can shift the balance, which is why preventing their persistence is so critical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2025, Sahingur and her team published a high-impact study<\/a> in the Journal of Dental Research exploring how natural compounds called flavonoids \u2014 organic plant pigments now attracting interest from the broader aging field \u2014 may offer a way to selectively target the most harmful senescent cells without shutting down the senescence response entirely, which the body needs for wound healing and tissue repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn her paper, she demonstrated that an anti-senescence therapy, or \u201csenotherapy,\u201d consisting of an enzyme inhibitor called dasatinib and the natural flavonoid quercetin, successfully reduced these harmful cells, dampened inflammation, and mitigated periodontal bone loss in lab and animal models. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The work points toward a new therapeutic frontier: treating oral disease not just locally, but through the biology of aging itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Inflammation and senescence are physiological processes, so we don’t want to shut them down entirely,” she said. That is why the research into the natural flavonoids is so promising: \u201cwe can hit those really bad actors without disrupting the system as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paying It Forward<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nS. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D. standing with periodontics students during her visit back to the VCU School of Dentistry in 2025. (Provided photo).<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nNow in an administrative leadership role at the University of Pennsylvania, Sahingur has carried her experience as a mentored scholar into how she supports the next generation of clinicians and researchers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Leadership is not about yourself; it\u2019s about making things right for the people who are depending on you,” she said. “Whether it\u2019s students, trainees, faculty, or administrators, my responsibility is to make sure they\u2019re growing and supported \u2014because their success is the real measure of mine and that has been my philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When asked what advice she would offer a current K Scholar navigating the pressures of early-career research, her answer was direct: don’t give up, choose your mentors carefully, and stay focused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPerseverance is essential,\u201d she said. \u201cBut just as important is surrounding yourself with the right mentors\u2014not those with the biggest titles, but those who are truly invested in developing people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her case, she credits not only the Wright Center, but also the leadership within the VCU School of Dentistry and the Department of Periodontics for fostering a uniquely supportive and nurturing environment . \u201cI was incredibly fortunate,\u201d she said. \u201cThat level of support\u2014and having leaders who genuinely cared about my development\u2014made all the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sahingur also urges early-career researchers to stay focused. \u201cBuild depth where you have data and a solid support system, secure that first grant, and then expand. Trying to do too much too soon can hold you back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than a decade since Sahingur completed her KL2 and almost seven years after leaving Richmond for Philadelphia, those connections remain. \u201cEveryone was supportive,\u201d she said. \u201cI always felt they had my back.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe science evolves, the questions change\u2014but the impact you make on people is what lasts.\u201d she adds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been fortunate to have people who believed in me at the right time\u2014and that\u2019s something I try to pass on every day.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Wright Center’s KL2 Scholar program \u2014 now known as the K12 Program \u2014 continues to support early-career clinical and translational researchers at VCU. For more information about the program, visit cctr.vcu.edu\/education-and-training\/kl2-program<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How does a junior faculty member evolve into a national leader in periodontal research? For S. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D., the catalyst was the Wright Center\u2019s KL2 scholarship. Now the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Student Research at the University of Pennsylvania, Sahingur\u2019s career trajectory\u2014including nearly $4 million in NIH R01 funding\u2014demonstrates how the Wright Center\u2019s K12 Program serves as a powerful launchpad for clinician-scientists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,68,13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-impact","category-kl2","category-mentorship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3530,"date":"2026-05-01T21:05:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T21:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3530"},"modified":"2026-05-01T21:06:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T21:06:00","slug":"wright-center-awards-four-nih-funded-grants-to-accelerate-medical-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/05\/01\/wright-center-awards-four-nih-funded-grants-to-accelerate-medical-research\/","title":{"rendered":"From A.I. to Wearables: VCU\u2019s Wright Center awards four NIH-funded grants to accelerate medical research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
RICHMOND, Va.<\/strong> \u2014 The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research<\/a> announced today the awarding of $100,000 to four interdisciplinary research projects at Virginia Commonwealth University. These $25,000 pilot awards<\/a> are funded through the Wright Center\u2019s $27 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), supporting the center’s mission to identify and solve systemic hurdles in medical research.<\/p>\n\n\n\nUnlike traditional medical research, which focuses on specific diseases, these Translational Science<\/strong> grants fund the development of new methods, technologies, and research practices that are “disease agnostic.” The goal is to create generalizable solutions that can be applied across many different fields of medicine to make the journey from laboratory discovery to patient care faster and more efficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n“The purpose of these awards is to improve the translational process,” said F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., Director of the Wright Center. “By identifying and overcoming the scientific and operational hurdles\u2014or bottlenecks\u2014that slow down research, we aren’t just supporting four studies; we are developing a more effective framework for all future medical research at VCU and beyond.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 2026 awardees and their projects:<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nJuan Pablo Arab, M.D. (School of Medicine<\/a>) and Ekaterina Smirnova, Ph.D. (School of Public Health<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cWearable biosensors for accurate detection of alcohol use in patients with alcohol-associated liver disease\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nJuan Pablo Arab Verdugo, MD, Hepatology and Nutrition, Internal Medicine, School of Medicine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nEkaterina Smirnova, Ph.D., Biostatistics, School of Public Health<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nEkaterina Smirnova, Ph.D., an associate professor in VCU\u2019s School of Public Health<\/a>, and Juan Pablo Arab, M.D., an associate professor of medicine, and the inaugural director of alcohol sciences at the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health<\/a>, have won a pilot award for a project which aims to leverage emerging wearable technology to provide objective, real-world monitoring of alcohol use in patients with liver disease.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis project seeks to overcome the unreliability of patient self-reporting, creating a new validated standard for detecting heavy drinking episodes that can be translated to treating many other alcohol-related conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis project addresses a major translational bottleneck in alcohol-associated liver disease: our inability to accurately measure alcohol use in patients\u2019 real-world environments,\u201d said Arab. \u201cA major strength of this work is its multidisciplinary nature, bringing together clinical hepatology and quantitative expertise in collaboration with Dr. Ekaterina Smirnova, whose leadership in statistics and wearable health technology is helping move this field forward.\u201d Arab explained that this pilot award supports the integration of wearable biosensors with established biomarkers, such as phosphatidylethanol (PEth), which is a direct metabolite of ethanol measurable in the blood. This approach allows for the collection of data required to transition from subjective self-reports to more precise and scalable monitoring solutions. \u201cThis support from the Wright Center is an important step toward improving risk stratification, strengthening clinical research, and ultimately developing better interventions for our patients,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Na Bo, Ph.D. (School of Public Health)<\/strong> \u201cAdvancing Precision Medicine: Novel Statistical and AI Methods to Characterize Treatment Heterogeneity in Survival Data\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\nNa Bo, Ph.D., Biostatistics, School of Public Health<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nNa Bo, Ph.D.<\/a>, an assistant professor in VCU\u2019s School of Public Health<\/a>, was awarded a pilot award for a project which addresses a critical barrier in precision medicine: while randomized clinical trials provide valuable insights by estimating the overall treatment effect in the study population, what works well for the average patient may not work for everyone. By developing novel AI-powered prediction models, her team aims to help doctors accurately predict how individual patients\u2014not just the “average” patient\u2014will respond to specific treatments based on their unique medical profiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cThis research project focuses on developing novel statistical methods and clinician-facing computational tools to characterize heterogeneous treatment effects in survival data,\u201d said Bo. She explained that the project answers a crucial translational science question: \u201cWill a patient survive longer or have a delayed disease progression if taking a treatment versus an alternative? This work is generalizable to many translational science areas such as cardiology, pulmonary, psychiatry, hepatology, etc. for targeted therapy development and optimal treatment decision making at the point of care. This grant helps to access data, develop the software and disseminate the work to broader clinician-scientists and statistics communities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Erin Britton, Ph.D., M.P.H. (School of Public Health)<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cBuilding a Virginia APCD Training Platform for a Data-Proficient Research Workforce\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\nErin L. Britton, Ph.D., M.P.H., Department of Health Policy, School of Public Health<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nErin L. Britton, Ph.D., M.P.H.<\/a>, an assistant professor in VCU\u2019s School of Public Health<\/a> was awarded a translational science pilot award for a project targeting the technical bottleneck that prevents researchers from effectively using the Virginia All-Payer Claims Database (VA-APCD). Designed to support healthcare research and decision-making, the Virginia All-Payer Claims Database is a powerful health data resource enabling researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to better understand healthcare utilization, costs and outcomes across Virginia. However, this data is complex and protected for patient privacy, making it difficult for researchers to use. This creates a major bottleneck, where too few people with the right skills can use it to answer critical health questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBritton\u2019s project aims to create a “high-fidelity synthetic dataset”\u2014a safe practice environment that mimics real healthcare data without compromising patient privacy\u2014to train a new generation of data-proficient researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTo accelerate translational research and support evidence-based healthcare policy around things like tobacco use and insurance coverage for doula care, we need to combine rigorous study designs with real-world data; and building that expertise requires practice,” said Britton. “My pilot addresses the growing demand for research using real-world data that was not collected for research by building a hands-on learning opportunity. The Wright Center’s support is an investment in expanding research capacity at our university and will help me efficiently train data-proficient collaborators to advance research on reducing care fragmentation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Karen Chartier, Ph.D. (School of Social Work) and Ananda Amstadter, Ph.D. (School of Medicine)<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cAdvancing Translational Science through Genome-Exome Data Integration across Ancestral Populations\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n\nKaren G. Chartier, Ph.D., School of Social Work<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAnanda B. Amstadter, Ph.D., Psychiatry, School of Medicine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nKaren G. Chartier, Ph.D.<\/a>, a professor in VCU\u2019s School of Social Work<\/a> and Ananda B. Amstadter, Ph.D.<\/a>, a professor in VCU\u2019s School of Medicine<\/a>, have won a pilot award for their project, which aims to modernize the long-standing Spit for Science<\/a> (S4S) registry, a unique resource with over 15,000 participants. Chartier and Amstadter will implement advanced genotyping technology to better capture rare genetic variants across the ancestry continuum, ensuring that the next generation of personalized medicine tools works for everyone, not just those of European descent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cGenetic research holds great promise for improving health outcomes, but many studies have historically focused on individuals of European ancestry, which limits our understanding of how genetic factors influence health across different populations and can lead to medical tools and treatments that don\u2019t work equally well for everyone,\u201d said Chartier and Amstadter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
They explained that by modernizing genotyping methods and refining analytical tools, this project will support the downstream discovery of genetic factors linked to hundreds of behavioral and emotional health outcomes measured across time. \u201cWith funding from the Wright Center, our project will produce a generalizable solution for this common bottleneck in genetics-informed translational research,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more information about the Wright Center\u2019s pilot grant programs and other funding opportunities, visit cctr.vcu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAbout the Wright Center:<\/strong> The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research at VCU is part of a national network of centers funded by the NIH\u2019s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). The center provides researchers with the infrastructure, funding, and training needed to turn scientific discoveries into health solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RICHMOND, Va. \u2014 The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research announced today the awarding of $100,000 to four interdisciplinary research projects at Virginia Commonwealth University. These $25,000 pilot awards are funded through the Wright Center\u2019s $27 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,11,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-data-science","category-funding","category-translational-science-pilot-awards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3518,"date":"2026-04-27T19:52:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T19:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3518"},"modified":"2026-04-28T15:14:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T15:14:38","slug":"national-leadership-on-display-the-wright-center-at-acts-ts26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/04\/27\/national-leadership-on-display-the-wright-center-at-acts-ts26\/","title":{"rendered":"National Leadership on Display: the Wright Center at ACTS TS26"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Last week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Wright Center\u2019s own Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S.<\/strong> and Leah Gregory, M.P.H., M.S.W.<\/strong> brought VCU\u2019s innovative community engagement strategies to a national audience of peer institutions. They presented at the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS)<\/a><\/strong> annual conference, Translational Science 2026 (TS26)<\/a><\/strong>, one of the most significant annual gatherings in the country for researchers dedicated to turning laboratory discoveries into real-world health solutions. They were joined by Wright Center director F. Gerard Moeller, M.D.<\/strong>, and a robust team of VCU experts whose contributions spanned the entire spectrum of translational science.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAdvocating for the Future of Translational Science<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nWright Center director F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., (seated first on right) shares insights at the Research Operations and Administration Special Interest Group (SIG) panel, on April 20 at the ACTS Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nWright Center director, F. Gerard Moeller, M.D.,<\/strong> took a central role in the Research Operations and Administration Special Interest Group (SIG), participating in a two-part panel discussion. In “The 2026 Advocacy Playbook: Navigating the Future of CTSA Funding,” Dr. Moeller highlighted the vital coordination between PIs, administrators, and state government officials. He also contributed to sessions on “Beyond the Grant,” where he discussed building leadership pipelines and transition planning to ensure institutional knowledge and funding continuity across the CTSA consortium.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Research Operations and Administration (ROA) SIG pose for a photo after their session.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nEvaluating the “Heart” of Research<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nEmily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S. (Wright Center Co-Lead of the CTS Research Program) and Leah Gregory, M.P.H., M.S.W. (Wright Center Community & Collaboration Program Manager) spoke on a panel about evaluating community engaged research partnerships on Thursday, April 23.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nTranslational science is only as strong as the partnerships behind it. In their interactive workshop, “Does This Partnership Work?”<\/em>, Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S.<\/strong> (Wright Center Co-Lead of the CTS Research Program) and Leah Gregory, M.P.H., M.S.W.,<\/strong> (Wright Center Community & Collaboration Program Manager) explored the critical task of evaluating Community Engaged Research (CEnR). While many institutions focus purely on final health data, the Wright Center team emphasized the importance of evaluating the process<\/em> of partnership itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCollaborating with colleagues from the University of Minnesota and the University of Colorado at Denver, they addressed the foundational elements of successful collaboration, such as ensuring power-sharing and equitable decision-making. By utilizing innovative methodologies like storytelling sessions and “mutual sensemaking” tools alongside traditional quantitative surveys, they demonstrated how academic and community partners can foster mutual growth and program improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Center-Wide Contribution<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nDeborah DiazGranados, Ph.D., (second from left), director of evaluation and team science for the Wright Center, participated in a session about advancing continuous evaluation for translational science across CTSA hubs on Tuesday, April 21. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nBeyond community engagement, the Wright Center\u2019s influence was felt across several key areas of the conference. Deborah DiazGranados, Ph.D.<\/strong>, director of evaluation and team science at the Wright Center, participated in a session with colleagues from CTSA hubs from the University of Michigan, University of Texas Medical Branch, and University of Southern California, sharing insights on advancing continuous evaluation for translational science.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn addition, Pamela Dillon, Pharm.D.<\/strong>, presented a poster on “Bridging the Gap: Training Researchers to Share Their Work,” together with co-author Andrea Molzhon, Ph.D<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nShirley Helm, M.S., CCRP (first on the left), participated in a panel on the state of the Clinical Research Professional (CRP) workforce.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Center also took a leading role in discussing the future of the Clinical Research Professional (CRP) workforce. Shirley Helm, M.S., CCRP<\/strong>, participated in a high-level panel on the state of the CRP workforce and presented posters on intra-institutional strategies for career entry\u2014co-authored with Elizabeth Fortune, MBA<\/strong>\u2014and national landscape analyses of mentoring programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\nShirley Helm, M.S., CCRP, highlights her poster, co-authored with Elizabeth Fortune, M.B.A., C.R.P., and Lauretta Cathers, Ph.D., LMSW, about the new undergraduate minor in research ecosystems created with the VCU College of Health Professions.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nShirley Helm, M.S., CCRP, is co-lead for the CRP Taskforce at ACTS. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nNational Visibility and Leadership<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nThe Wright Center’s impact extended into the leadership of ACTS itself. Our team members currently hold influential roles within Special Interest Groups (SIGs), including Shirley Helm, M.S., CCRP,<\/strong> (co-lead for the CRP Taskforce), Pam Dillon, Pharm.D.<\/strong> (vice chair for the Scholar SIG), and Elizabeth Fortune, M.B.A.<\/strong> (chair for the Research Operations and Administration SIG).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe participation of our leaders at ACTS TS26 underscores the Wright Center\u2019s<\/strong> visibility and influence within the national translational science landscape. By sharing these insights with other CTSA hubs, the Wright Regional Center is not only participating in the national research agenda\u2014it is setting the standard for how institutions and communities work together to create a healthier future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Wright Center\u2019s own Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S. and Leah Gregory, M.P.H., M.S.W. brought VCU\u2019s innovative community engagement strategies to a national audience of peer institutions. They presented at the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS) annual conference, Translational Science 2026 (TS26), one of the most significant annual gatherings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,70,68,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-community-engagement","category-evaluation","category-impact","category-twd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3516,"date":"2026-04-24T15:29:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T15:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3516"},"modified":"2026-04-23T15:37:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T15:37:35","slug":"nih-update-besh-studies-no-longer-classified-as-clinical-trials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/04\/24\/nih-update-besh-studies-no-longer-classified-as-clinical-trials\/","title":{"rendered":"Important NIH Update: BESH Studies Will No Longer Be Classified as Clinical Trials"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
A policy change effective for funding opportunities with due dates on or after May 25, 2026 affects how certain human studies are categorized \u2014 and funded.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat’s Changing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The NIH has announced that Basic Experimental Studies with Humans (BESH)<\/strong> will no longer be classified as clinical trials<\/a>. This is a significant shift that affects how investigators apply for funding and whether their studies must be registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis change applies to any funding opportunity with a due date on or after May 25, 2026<\/strong>. Studies already registered on ClinicalTrials.gov under the current rules are not affected<\/strong> by this change.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKey Definitions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What is an NIH Clinical Trial?<\/strong> NIH defines a clinical trial as a research study in which one or more human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions (which may include placebo or other control) to evaluate the effects of those interventions on health-related biomedical or behavioral outcomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat is a BESH Study?<\/strong> A Basic Experimental Study with Humans (BESH) is a study that prospectively assigns human participants to conditions but does so to study basic aspects of phenomena (such as biological, psychological, or social processes) \u2014 without<\/strong> a specific intent to inform a clinical health outcome. Previously, BESH studies met the NIH clinical trial definition and had to be submitted accordingly. Going forward, they will not.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFor detailed definitions and examples, visit the NIH resource page: Is My Project a Clinical Trial, Basic Experimental Study Involving Humans (BESH), or an Observational Study Involving Humans?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat Does This Mean for Investigators?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
If you are submitting a new grant application:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n- BESH studies may no longer be submitted through clinical trial funding opportunities<\/strong>. They must be submitted to non-clinical trial funding opportunities.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Conversely, if your study is a clinical trial, it must be submitted through a clinical trial funding opportunity.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- NIH has not announced dedicated BESH-only funding opportunities at this time. BESH studies will fall under the “non-clinical trial” category of existing opportunities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
An important rule of thumb:<\/strong> If your funding opportunity announcement designates the study as a clinical trial, your study is a clinical trial<\/strong> \u2014 regardless of whether you believe it meets the BESH definition. The funding opportunity designation is what governs registration and reporting requirements at our institution. When in doubt, err on the side of registration.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf your study is already registered on ClinicalTrials.gov:<\/strong> No action is required. This policy change does not affect studies already registered under current rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf your study is funded by a funding opportunity with a due date from now until May 24, 2026: <\/strong>It will follow the old registration requirements and will require studies meeting the BESH definition to be registered as a clinical trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy Does This Matter?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Not all investigators are aware of how their studies are classified \u2014 and this change adds a new layer to that determination. Some studies that were previously submitted and funded as clinical trials may now be categorized differently going forward. If you are planning a new submission, it is worth reviewing your study design against both the NIH clinical trial definition and the BESH definition before selecting a funding opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you receive funding under a clinical trial opportunity, ClinicalTrials.gov registration and results reporting requirements still apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Questions?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
If you are unsure how this change applies to your study, please reach out to our team at cctrctgov@vcu.edu<\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong>We’re here to help you navigate these definitions before you submit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A policy change effective for funding opportunities with due dates on or after May 25, 2026 affects how certain human studies are categorized \u2014 and funded. What’s Changing? The NIH has announced that Basic Experimental Studies with Humans (BESH) will no longer be classified as clinical trials. This is a significant shift that affects how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clinical-trials","category-funding","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3512,"date":"2026-04-21T15:49:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T15:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3512"},"modified":"2026-04-21T19:58:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T19:58:37","slug":"celebrating-our-2026-wright-center-service-award-honorees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/04\/21\/celebrating-our-2026-wright-center-service-award-honorees\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Our 2026 Wright Center Service Recognition Honorees"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The Wright Center is proud to recognize the dedication and hard work of our team members who will be honored at VCU\u2019s Annual Service Recognition Celebration<\/a><\/strong> on Tuesday, April 28, 2026 at the Siegel Center. These individuals have contributed their time, talent, and passion to advancing research and innovation, making a lasting impact on the Wright Center and the communities we serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHonoring Our Long-Serving Team Members<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nAs Vice President for Research and Innovation P. Srirama Rao, Ph.D., recently noted, what our team members do matters and helps produce locally relevant, nationally prominent, and globally recognized research focused on lifting lives and addressing society’s most vexing challenges. We thank them for their incredible hard work and dedication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We celebrate our colleagues achieving service milestones this year:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
“In the early days of COVID, everyone had this aspiration to do something to help,” says Evan French, M.S., Data Team Manager at the Wright Center. “Amy jumped into N3C with both feet in Spring 2020 and immediately began organizing a team of clinicians, informaticists, and statisticians around the specific goal of understanding how COVID was affecting some of the most clinically vulnerable populations.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This initiative resulted in what French describes as a “prolific string of publications.” As a leader of the Immunocompromised and Suppressed Domain Team<\/a>, Olex served as a vital \u201cdoor opener\u201d\u2014training researchers to access and navigate the enclave while managing the underlying data infrastructure. Though she often worked as a facilitator rather than a lead author, her contributions were so foundational that she is acknowledged as a \u201ccore contributor\u201d on nearly every paper the N3C produced. That work has had measurable global reach: N3C research she supported has been cited in policy documents across six countries, informing the guidelines of organizations including the United Nations<\/a> and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Closer to home, Olex identifies her decade-long collaboration with Chuck Harrell, Ph.D.,<\/a> an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology, as one of her most meaningful contributions to VCU.<\/p>\n\n\n “I’ve been working with Chuck for 11 years. I\u2019ve been at the Wright Center for 12.” Olex reflects. “He was one of my very first collaborators.” Harrell\u2019s lab specializes in breast cancer research<\/a>, specifically utilizing Patient-Derived Xenograft (PDX) models\u2014human tumor cells grown in immune-suppressed mice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Olex\u2019s role in Harrell\u2019s research was central to a major technical hurdle: when tumor tissue is grown in a mouse, the resulting genetic data is a messy mix of both species. “The pipelines that I developed for Chuck were the first at VCU to be able to bioinformatically and computationally separate human and mouse genetic material,” she explained at a recent Wright Center presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When asked to describe her impact on his research lab, Harrell was effusive. He recalled recognizing Olex\u2019s value almost immediately after joining the VCU faculty\u2014someone who would become, in his words, a critical member of his research team. \u201cWhile initially her role was to perform bioinformatic analyses,\u201d Harrell said, \u201cshe quickly became an unofficial co-mentor to nearly all of the students that have been part of my lab for the past decade.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2023, a NCI U54 grant expanded the collaboration further, broadening PDX development across multiple cancer types and growing Olex\u2019s role to encompass the full range of genomic and proteomic data generated by the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Summing up her overall contribution, he was direct: “Amy was a huge part in the success of our group. She contributed to 13 publications, over $10 million in research funding from our team, and directly contributed to 10 PhD thesis projects.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read More: Massey researchers first to develop comprehensive models of “seeds and soil” as a means to combat breast cancer metastasis<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n While Olex was busy building these high-level pipelines for VCU investigators, she was also quietly advancing her own academic journey. In 2016, she enrolled in VCU’s Computer Science Ph.D. program, taking one class per semester while maintaining her full-time role at the Wright Center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She worked with her dissertation advisor, Bridget McInnes, Ph.D.,<\/a> who understood that for a working mother and senior scientist, the Ph.D. was \u201cthe extra thing, not the primary thing.\u201d McInnes\u2019s focus on natural language processing allowed Olex to build bridges between computer science and clinical applications\u2014a theme that has defined her entire career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Completing a doctorate while working full-time required extraordinary discipline. Olex frequently spent her weekends at the local skating rink, typing away on her dissertation while her children skated laps. She finished in six years\u2014faster than her own projection\u2014and along the way found herself at a technological frontier: when she began her dissertation work, Google\u2019s BERT<\/a>\u2014now recognized as the first large language model to reshape the field\u2014had just been released in 2017. Olex was among the earliest researchers to work with it, fine-tuning those early models for clinical text applications years before \u201cLLM\u201d entered everyday vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This breadth of experience\u2014from data management to cutting-edge natural language processing\u2014informed her second great contribution to VCU: her role as an educator. Shortly after joining the Wright Center, Olex was tasked with helping investigators and researchers understand how bioinformatics could drive drug discovery and precision medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2017, Olex launched the “Bioinformatics 101”<\/a> seminar series, offering free sessions to anyone\u2014inside or outside VCU\u2014for five years, working to saturate the campus with bioinformatics literacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Olex eventually distilled her cumulative expertise into CCTR 691<\/strong><\/a>, a comprehensive three-credit course for clinical and translational science students that distills her 12 years at the Wright Center into an immediately applicable curriculum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The impact of the course is best seen through the feedback of her students. \u201cI started this course without any understanding of informatics at all, and now feel like I could listen to a lecture or read a paper and understand the vocabulary, concepts, and the point,\u201d wrote one student in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Olex, making complex topics approachable is the ultimate goal. \u201cI\u2019m not just teaching theory,\u201d she says. \u201cI teach specific skills that you can apply immediately to your work. I\u2019m focused on what is going to be an immediate value add to your workflow today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout her career, Olex has been most at home at the crossroads of disciplines\u2014between computer science and clinical medicine, between data infrastructure and research outcomes, between the specialist\u2019s deep knowledge and the generalist\u2019s ability to communicate across silos. The Wright Center, she says, was the place where she got to live that instinct at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTranslational research to me is trying to understand where the other person is coming from, what\u2019s important to them, what their priorities are\u2014and then taking what\u2019s important to me and folding it into their paradigm,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t know of anywhere else where I would have been able to get all of that experience in one job. The Wright Center really put me in a unique position.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The move to Stravitz-Sanyal is about the opportunity to build from the ground up once again. Olex spent years facilitating other people’s research; now, she will be architecting the multimodal bioinformatics infrastructure for a young institute with global ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I\u2019m not disappearing,” Olex says. “I think a lot of the stuff that I\u2019ll be building at Stravitz-Sanyal will be applicable beyond and have an impact on VCU as a whole. You have all shaped my career, and I’m so grateful that you primed me for this new challenge.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wright Center Director F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., offered his own send-off: \u201cThank you, Amy, for your tireless commitment to your discipline, but also to your commitment to the whole spectrum of translational science. Your work raised the bar for our center every day. We will miss you and wish you all the best.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please join us in thanking Amy Olex, Ph.D., for her extraordinary service, her mentorship, and her unwavering commitment to the VCU research community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After 12 years, 57 publications, and a hand in securing millions in research funding, Amy Olex, Ph.D., is leaving the Wright Center \u2014 but not VCU. Her bioinformatics pipelines powered landmark cancer research, her COVID data work shaped health policy across six countries, and her teaching, from the “Bioinformatics 101” seminar series to a graduate course still running today, brought hundreds of researchers into the fold. “I don’t know of anywhere else where I would have been able to get all of that experience in one job,” she says. “The Wright Center really put me in a unique position.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,68,16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-science","category-impact","category-research","category-staff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3543,"date":"2026-05-07T20:47:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3543"},"modified":"2026-05-11T01:54:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T01:54:21","slug":"wright-center-graduate-students-win-honors-at-vcus-20th-annual-womens-health-research-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/05\/07\/wright-center-graduate-students-win-honors-at-vcus-20th-annual-womens-health-research-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Wright Center Graduate Students Win Honors at VCU\u2019s 20th Annual Women\u2019s Health Research Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Two graduate students from the VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research<\/a> were among the top honorees at the 20th Annual Women\u2019s Health Research Day<\/a>. The event, hosted by the VCU Institute for Women\u2019s Health on April 28, 2026, centered on the theme “Midlife Matters: Integrating Menopause Research, Innovation, and Impact.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gowtami Aishwarya Panguluri, a Ph.D. student at the Wright Center, achieved a rare “double win,” taking home both the Basic Sciences Research Best Poster Award<\/strong> and the Emerging Investigator Research Award<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Panguluri\u2019s research, titled “Pubertal AGE exposure reprograms mammary fibroblasts through RAGE-MYC signaling: Implications for Women’s Breast Cancer Risk,”<\/em> explores how early-life dietary exposures to Advanced Glycation End Products can mechanistically influence long-term Breast Cancer risk. <\/p>\n\n\n Working under the mentorship of Victoria Findlay, Ph.D., Panguluri\u2019s study bridges the gap between basic molecular biology and population-level health outcomes. Her poster emphasizes mammary fibroblasts, structural support cells in breast tissue, as the site where AGE exposure leaves a lasting biological imprint. She shows that these cells, once exposed to AGEs, retain an activated state and actively encourage cancer-related cell movement through a receptor called RAGE (the cellular “docking station” that AGEs bind to in order to exert their effects). Critically, she identifies MYC, a gene known to drive cancer growth, as a key downstream player in this process, required for AGE-exposed fibroblasts to promote the migration and invasion of epithelial cells, the type that give rise to most breast cancers. She also validated these findings in an animal model, demonstrating that stromal RAGE, the version of this receptor found in the tissue surrounding cells, is required for tumor development in the mammary gland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Two targets, one pathway,” Panguluri said. “Stromal RAGE shapes the pro-tumorigenic microenvironment, and MYC is the downstream effector required for fibroblast-driven epithelial migration with dietary AGEs as a modifiable exposure, opening the door to intercepting breast cancer risk before a tumor ever forms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nour Abosamak, MD, a Ph.D. student mentored by Wright Center Director of Health Informatics Tamas Gal, Ph.D., received the Building Bridges in Interdisciplinary Women\u2019s Health Research Award<\/strong>, given to the poster that best demonstrates interdisciplinary collaboration in women\u2019s health research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The award-winning poster, “Hip Replacement & Postoperative Depressive Disorders: A 16-year Retrospective Cohort Study using Real-world Data,”<\/em> utilized the power of the Wright Center\u2019s TriNetX research network to analyze over 115 million patient records. narrowing the scope to 22,499 surgical patients aged 60 and older, the team uncovered an increased risk of major depressive disorder among those who underwent hip replacement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key Findings included:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n “This is a prime example of the utility of TriNetX,” Gal said. “By leveraging standardized, de-identified electronic health records from healthcare organizations, our students can uncover significant health disparities and clinical risks that might otherwise remain hidden in smaller datasets.”<\/p>\n\n\n The study was the result of a collaboration between two Wright Center graduate students. The project was initiated by Simone Intriago Tito, a first-year Clinical and Translational Sciences (CTS) doctoral student, during her research rotation with Gretchen Neigh, Ph.D., MBA. Seeking to expand the study’s scope through advanced informatics, Intriago Tito reached out to Abosamak, whose expertise in TriNetX and bioanalytics were invaluable throughout the project. Their collaboration\u2014bridging initial clinical inquiry with complex data analysis\u2014was so integrated that both are expected to serve as co-first authors on the forthcoming manuscript. The interdisciplinary project also included contributors from the Dept. of Neuroscience and Anatomy, the VCU College of Engineering, and the Wright Center\u2019s Collaborative Advance Research Imaging (CARI) program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gretchen Neigh, Ph.D., MBA, the Wright Center\u2019s director of education and mentoring, noted that the success of these students reflects the center’s commitment to fostering well-rounded investigators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Seeing our students recognized at this level is a testament to the rigorous, collaborative environment we strive to create at the Wright Center,” she said. Neigh, who is also the director of translational research for the Institute of Women\u2019s Health, continued, “Our students are demonstrating how collaborative, interdisciplinary translational science can tackle complex issues in women\u2019s health, from the cellular level to large-scale population health.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now in its 20th year, Women\u2019s Health Research Day is a premier symposium at VCU designed to celebrate and promote research activities dedicated to the health of women. The 2026 event featured a symposium at the Larrick Student Center on the MCV Campus, providing a platform for students, faculty, and clinicians to share a diverse array of research spanning the spectrum of women’s health throughout the lifespan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information on the Wright Center\u2019s training and informatics resources, visit cctr.vcu.edu<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two graduate students from the VCU C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research were among the top honorees at the 20th Annual Women\u2019s Health Research Day. The event, hosted by the VCU Institute for Women\u2019s Health on April 28, 2026, centered on the theme “Midlife Matters: Integrating Menopause Research, Innovation, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-mentorship","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3538,"date":"2026-05-06T08:28:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T08:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3538"},"modified":"2026-05-13T01:50:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T01:50:33","slug":"how-a-wright-center-kl2-scholar-became-a-national-leader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/05\/06\/how-a-wright-center-kl2-scholar-became-a-national-leader\/","title":{"rendered":"From Richmond to Philadelphia: how a Wright Center KL2 scholar became a national leader in periodontal research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Now a leader at the University of Pennsylvania, S. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D. continues to carry the lessons and community of VCU\u2019s Wright Center in her heart.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When S. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D., returned to VCU’s School of Dentistry<\/a> in spring 2025 to deliver the keynote address at the School of Dentistry\u2019s Research Day<\/a>, she found herself unexpectedly emotional. It had been exactly two decades since she first walked through those doors as a new faculty member \u2014 a clinician-scientist balancing the competing demands of clinical care, laboratory research, and raising two young children while carving out a place in academia as an immigrant. The path forward was anything but certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It was very emotional to come back,” she recalled. “I always had very good memories. I love VCU.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, Sahingur serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Student Research<\/a> at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Dental Medicine, where she also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Periodontics. She is a Diplomate of the American Board of Periodontology, Fellow of The Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine\u00ae (ELAM\u00ae) program<\/a> and a widely published researcher whose work has appeared in the field’s most prestigious journals with several papers making the covers of those publications. But in tracing the arc of her career, she returns again and again to her time at VCU’s C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research, where she was a KL2 Scholar from 2013 to 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Wright Center is always very close to my heart,” she said. “It\u2019s not only about my academic career, but also personally. I always had a very positive relationship there; the mentorship, the friendship, and the camaraderie shaped my career and touched me both personally and professionally.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The KL2 program \u2014 similar to the K12 award the Wright Center administers today \u2014 is funded by the National Institutes of Health through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). It provides early-career faculty with protected research time, salary support, and mentorship, all with the goal of helping young clinician-scientists cross the difficult gap between promising junior researcher and independently funded investigator. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2013, Sahingur made a big leap forward in crossing that gap. She was an inaugural recipient<\/a> of the Wright Center’s Endowment Fund<\/a> and that same year, she was awarded the KL2 grant<\/a>, providing critical funding and support at a pivotal moment in her career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Sahingur, the timing was critical. “It is always tough to be a clinician-scientist in a clinical department; you are essentially divided into two parts,” she said. “You can\u2019t be 100% in the clinic with your colleagues, but you also cannot be in the lab 100% of the time like our PhD colleagues.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The awards through the Wright Center changed that equation. The grants gave her protected time away from some departmental responsibilities, funding to hire a postdoctoral researcher, and \u2014 perhaps most importantly \u2014 the institutional signal that her work was worth believing in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This K award helped me continue pushing,” she said, recalling the early frustrations common to junior faculty. “It gave me an incentive to know that people believed in me. I’m not alone in this.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years after completing her KL2, she was awarded a $1.9 million NIH R01 grant<\/a> \u2014 becoming the first Wright Center KL2 Scholar to receive a Research Project Grant from the NIH. A second grant of nearly $2 million followed soon after<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond the funding and protected time, Sahingur emphasizes the community that the Wright Center built \u2014 the cross-disciplinary relationships that, she says, fundamentally changed how she approaches science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I was very fortunate to be with people who really cared and truly wanted to collaborate,” she said. Those connections led to joint grant proposals spanning the medical school, dental school, and engineering, even if some of those early efforts weren’t immediately funded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You learn how to communicate, how to carry yourself, and how to be open to the ideas of others,” she said. “You learn to listen and collegially come up with a final product. Even when we didn’t agree, navigating those situations was important for building my career.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those relationships didn’t end when Sahingur left Richmond. She is still in touch and collaborating with colleagues from various schools at VCU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At VCU, Sahingur’s research centered on understanding the immune and inflammatory pathways that drive periodontitis \u2014 a chronic form of gum disease affecting nearly half of American adults. Periodontitis is not just a dental issue \u2013 it is linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, pregnancy complications and neurological and liver diseases. Her early NIH-funded work focused on TLR9, an immune receptor that, when activated by oral microbial DNA, can trigger runaway inflammation and bone loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the years since, her research has followed the data \u2014 sometimes to unexpected places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I\u2019ve been following the data and staying open-minded,” she said. “And stunned, honestly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n That path has led her to one of biomedical research’s most exciting new frontiers: cellular senescence<\/a>, the process by which damaged cells stop dividing but linger in tissues, quietly stoking inflammation. In aging populations, these so-called “ghost cells” (also known as zombie cells) accumulate faster than the immune system can clear them, accelerating tissue dysfunction \u2014 including in the gums and surrounding bone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t take many dysfunctional cells to disrupt the entire environment\u2014it\u2019s a bit like a few disruptive elements in an otherwise healthy system. Even in small numbers, they can shift the balance, which is why preventing their persistence is so critical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2025, Sahingur and her team published a high-impact study<\/a> in the Journal of Dental Research exploring how natural compounds called flavonoids \u2014 organic plant pigments now attracting interest from the broader aging field \u2014 may offer a way to selectively target the most harmful senescent cells without shutting down the senescence response entirely, which the body needs for wound healing and tissue repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her paper, she demonstrated that an anti-senescence therapy, or \u201csenotherapy,\u201d consisting of an enzyme inhibitor called dasatinib and the natural flavonoid quercetin, successfully reduced these harmful cells, dampened inflammation, and mitigated periodontal bone loss in lab and animal models. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The work points toward a new therapeutic frontier: treating oral disease not just locally, but through the biology of aging itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Inflammation and senescence are physiological processes, so we don’t want to shut them down entirely,” she said. That is why the research into the natural flavonoids is so promising: \u201cwe can hit those really bad actors without disrupting the system as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now in an administrative leadership role at the University of Pennsylvania, Sahingur has carried her experience as a mentored scholar into how she supports the next generation of clinicians and researchers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Leadership is not about yourself; it\u2019s about making things right for the people who are depending on you,” she said. “Whether it\u2019s students, trainees, faculty, or administrators, my responsibility is to make sure they\u2019re growing and supported \u2014because their success is the real measure of mine and that has been my philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When asked what advice she would offer a current K Scholar navigating the pressures of early-career research, her answer was direct: don’t give up, choose your mentors carefully, and stay focused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPerseverance is essential,\u201d she said. \u201cBut just as important is surrounding yourself with the right mentors\u2014not those with the biggest titles, but those who are truly invested in developing people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her case, she credits not only the Wright Center, but also the leadership within the VCU School of Dentistry and the Department of Periodontics for fostering a uniquely supportive and nurturing environment . \u201cI was incredibly fortunate,\u201d she said. \u201cThat level of support\u2014and having leaders who genuinely cared about my development\u2014made all the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sahingur also urges early-career researchers to stay focused. \u201cBuild depth where you have data and a solid support system, secure that first grant, and then expand. Trying to do too much too soon can hold you back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than a decade since Sahingur completed her KL2 and almost seven years after leaving Richmond for Philadelphia, those connections remain. \u201cEveryone was supportive,\u201d she said. \u201cI always felt they had my back.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe science evolves, the questions change\u2014but the impact you make on people is what lasts.\u201d she adds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ve been fortunate to have people who believed in me at the right time\u2014and that\u2019s something I try to pass on every day.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Wright Center’s KL2 Scholar program \u2014 now known as the K12 Program \u2014 continues to support early-career clinical and translational researchers at VCU. For more information about the program, visit cctr.vcu.edu\/education-and-training\/kl2-program<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How does a junior faculty member evolve into a national leader in periodontal research? For S. Esra Sahingur, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D., the catalyst was the Wright Center\u2019s KL2 scholarship. Now the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Student Research at the University of Pennsylvania, Sahingur\u2019s career trajectory\u2014including nearly $4 million in NIH R01 funding\u2014demonstrates how the Wright Center\u2019s K12 Program serves as a powerful launchpad for clinician-scientists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,68,13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-impact","category-kl2","category-mentorship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3530,"date":"2026-05-01T21:05:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T21:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3530"},"modified":"2026-05-01T21:06:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T21:06:00","slug":"wright-center-awards-four-nih-funded-grants-to-accelerate-medical-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/05\/01\/wright-center-awards-four-nih-funded-grants-to-accelerate-medical-research\/","title":{"rendered":"From A.I. to Wearables: VCU\u2019s Wright Center awards four NIH-funded grants to accelerate medical research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n RICHMOND, Va.<\/strong> \u2014 The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research<\/a> announced today the awarding of $100,000 to four interdisciplinary research projects at Virginia Commonwealth University. These $25,000 pilot awards<\/a> are funded through the Wright Center\u2019s $27 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), supporting the center’s mission to identify and solve systemic hurdles in medical research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike traditional medical research, which focuses on specific diseases, these Translational Science<\/strong> grants fund the development of new methods, technologies, and research practices that are “disease agnostic.” The goal is to create generalizable solutions that can be applied across many different fields of medicine to make the journey from laboratory discovery to patient care faster and more efficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The purpose of these awards is to improve the translational process,” said F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., Director of the Wright Center. “By identifying and overcoming the scientific and operational hurdles\u2014or bottlenecks\u2014that slow down research, we aren’t just supporting four studies; we are developing a more effective framework for all future medical research at VCU and beyond.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Juan Pablo Arab, M.D. (School of Medicine<\/a>) and Ekaterina Smirnova, Ph.D. (School of Public Health<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWearable biosensors for accurate detection of alcohol use in patients with alcohol-associated liver disease\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ekaterina Smirnova, Ph.D., an associate professor in VCU\u2019s School of Public Health<\/a>, and Juan Pablo Arab, M.D., an associate professor of medicine, and the inaugural director of alcohol sciences at the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health<\/a>, have won a pilot award for a project which aims to leverage emerging wearable technology to provide objective, real-world monitoring of alcohol use in patients with liver disease.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This project seeks to overcome the unreliability of patient self-reporting, creating a new validated standard for detecting heavy drinking episodes that can be translated to treating many other alcohol-related conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis project addresses a major translational bottleneck in alcohol-associated liver disease: our inability to accurately measure alcohol use in patients\u2019 real-world environments,\u201d said Arab. \u201cA major strength of this work is its multidisciplinary nature, bringing together clinical hepatology and quantitative expertise in collaboration with Dr. Ekaterina Smirnova, whose leadership in statistics and wearable health technology is helping move this field forward.\u201d Arab explained that this pilot award supports the integration of wearable biosensors with established biomarkers, such as phosphatidylethanol (PEth), which is a direct metabolite of ethanol measurable in the blood. This approach allows for the collection of data required to transition from subjective self-reports to more precise and scalable monitoring solutions. \u201cThis support from the Wright Center is an important step toward improving risk stratification, strengthening clinical research, and ultimately developing better interventions for our patients,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Na Bo, Ph.D. (School of Public Health)<\/strong> \u201cAdvancing Precision Medicine: Novel Statistical and AI Methods to Characterize Treatment Heterogeneity in Survival Data\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n Na Bo, Ph.D.<\/a>, an assistant professor in VCU\u2019s School of Public Health<\/a>, was awarded a pilot award for a project which addresses a critical barrier in precision medicine: while randomized clinical trials provide valuable insights by estimating the overall treatment effect in the study population, what works well for the average patient may not work for everyone. By developing novel AI-powered prediction models, her team aims to help doctors accurately predict how individual patients\u2014not just the “average” patient\u2014will respond to specific treatments based on their unique medical profiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis research project focuses on developing novel statistical methods and clinician-facing computational tools to characterize heterogeneous treatment effects in survival data,\u201d said Bo. She explained that the project answers a crucial translational science question: \u201cWill a patient survive longer or have a delayed disease progression if taking a treatment versus an alternative? This work is generalizable to many translational science areas such as cardiology, pulmonary, psychiatry, hepatology, etc. for targeted therapy development and optimal treatment decision making at the point of care. This grant helps to access data, develop the software and disseminate the work to broader clinician-scientists and statistics communities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erin Britton, Ph.D., M.P.H. (School of Public Health)<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBuilding a Virginia APCD Training Platform for a Data-Proficient Research Workforce\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n Erin L. Britton, Ph.D., M.P.H.<\/a>, an assistant professor in VCU\u2019s School of Public Health<\/a> was awarded a translational science pilot award for a project targeting the technical bottleneck that prevents researchers from effectively using the Virginia All-Payer Claims Database (VA-APCD). Designed to support healthcare research and decision-making, the Virginia All-Payer Claims Database is a powerful health data resource enabling researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to better understand healthcare utilization, costs and outcomes across Virginia. However, this data is complex and protected for patient privacy, making it difficult for researchers to use. This creates a major bottleneck, where too few people with the right skills can use it to answer critical health questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Britton\u2019s project aims to create a “high-fidelity synthetic dataset”\u2014a safe practice environment that mimics real healthcare data without compromising patient privacy\u2014to train a new generation of data-proficient researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo accelerate translational research and support evidence-based healthcare policy around things like tobacco use and insurance coverage for doula care, we need to combine rigorous study designs with real-world data; and building that expertise requires practice,” said Britton. “My pilot addresses the growing demand for research using real-world data that was not collected for research by building a hands-on learning opportunity. The Wright Center’s support is an investment in expanding research capacity at our university and will help me efficiently train data-proficient collaborators to advance research on reducing care fragmentation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karen Chartier, Ph.D. (School of Social Work) and Ananda Amstadter, Ph.D. (School of Medicine)<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAdvancing Translational Science through Genome-Exome Data Integration across Ancestral Populations\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Karen G. Chartier, Ph.D.<\/a>, a professor in VCU\u2019s School of Social Work<\/a> and Ananda B. Amstadter, Ph.D.<\/a>, a professor in VCU\u2019s School of Medicine<\/a>, have won a pilot award for their project, which aims to modernize the long-standing Spit for Science<\/a> (S4S) registry, a unique resource with over 15,000 participants. Chartier and Amstadter will implement advanced genotyping technology to better capture rare genetic variants across the ancestry continuum, ensuring that the next generation of personalized medicine tools works for everyone, not just those of European descent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGenetic research holds great promise for improving health outcomes, but many studies have historically focused on individuals of European ancestry, which limits our understanding of how genetic factors influence health across different populations and can lead to medical tools and treatments that don\u2019t work equally well for everyone,\u201d said Chartier and Amstadter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They explained that by modernizing genotyping methods and refining analytical tools, this project will support the downstream discovery of genetic factors linked to hundreds of behavioral and emotional health outcomes measured across time. \u201cWith funding from the Wright Center, our project will produce a generalizable solution for this common bottleneck in genetics-informed translational research,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information about the Wright Center\u2019s pilot grant programs and other funding opportunities, visit cctr.vcu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About the Wright Center:<\/strong> The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research at VCU is part of a national network of centers funded by the NIH\u2019s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). The center provides researchers with the infrastructure, funding, and training needed to turn scientific discoveries into health solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" RICHMOND, Va. \u2014 The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research announced today the awarding of $100,000 to four interdisciplinary research projects at Virginia Commonwealth University. These $25,000 pilot awards are funded through the Wright Center\u2019s $27 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,11,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-data-science","category-funding","category-translational-science-pilot-awards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3518,"date":"2026-04-27T19:52:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T19:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3518"},"modified":"2026-04-28T15:14:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T15:14:38","slug":"national-leadership-on-display-the-wright-center-at-acts-ts26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/04\/27\/national-leadership-on-display-the-wright-center-at-acts-ts26\/","title":{"rendered":"National Leadership on Display: the Wright Center at ACTS TS26"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Last week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Wright Center\u2019s own Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S.<\/strong> and Leah Gregory, M.P.H., M.S.W.<\/strong> brought VCU\u2019s innovative community engagement strategies to a national audience of peer institutions. They presented at the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS)<\/a><\/strong> annual conference, Translational Science 2026 (TS26)<\/a><\/strong>, one of the most significant annual gatherings in the country for researchers dedicated to turning laboratory discoveries into real-world health solutions. They were joined by Wright Center director F. Gerard Moeller, M.D.<\/strong>, and a robust team of VCU experts whose contributions spanned the entire spectrum of translational science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wright Center director, F. Gerard Moeller, M.D.,<\/strong> took a central role in the Research Operations and Administration Special Interest Group (SIG), participating in a two-part panel discussion. In “The 2026 Advocacy Playbook: Navigating the Future of CTSA Funding,” Dr. Moeller highlighted the vital coordination between PIs, administrators, and state government officials. He also contributed to sessions on “Beyond the Grant,” where he discussed building leadership pipelines and transition planning to ensure institutional knowledge and funding continuity across the CTSA consortium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translational science is only as strong as the partnerships behind it. In their interactive workshop, “Does This Partnership Work?”<\/em>, Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S.<\/strong> (Wright Center Co-Lead of the CTS Research Program) and Leah Gregory, M.P.H., M.S.W.,<\/strong> (Wright Center Community & Collaboration Program Manager) explored the critical task of evaluating Community Engaged Research (CEnR). While many institutions focus purely on final health data, the Wright Center team emphasized the importance of evaluating the process<\/em> of partnership itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Collaborating with colleagues from the University of Minnesota and the University of Colorado at Denver, they addressed the foundational elements of successful collaboration, such as ensuring power-sharing and equitable decision-making. By utilizing innovative methodologies like storytelling sessions and “mutual sensemaking” tools alongside traditional quantitative surveys, they demonstrated how academic and community partners can foster mutual growth and program improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond community engagement, the Wright Center\u2019s influence was felt across several key areas of the conference. Deborah DiazGranados, Ph.D.<\/strong>, director of evaluation and team science at the Wright Center, participated in a session with colleagues from CTSA hubs from the University of Michigan, University of Texas Medical Branch, and University of Southern California, sharing insights on advancing continuous evaluation for translational science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition, Pamela Dillon, Pharm.D.<\/strong>, presented a poster on “Bridging the Gap: Training Researchers to Share Their Work,” together with co-author Andrea Molzhon, Ph.D<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Center also took a leading role in discussing the future of the Clinical Research Professional (CRP) workforce. Shirley Helm, M.S., CCRP<\/strong>, participated in a high-level panel on the state of the CRP workforce and presented posters on intra-institutional strategies for career entry\u2014co-authored with Elizabeth Fortune, MBA<\/strong>\u2014and national landscape analyses of mentoring programs.<\/p>\n\n\n The Wright Center’s impact extended into the leadership of ACTS itself. Our team members currently hold influential roles within Special Interest Groups (SIGs), including Shirley Helm, M.S., CCRP,<\/strong> (co-lead for the CRP Taskforce), Pam Dillon, Pharm.D.<\/strong> (vice chair for the Scholar SIG), and Elizabeth Fortune, M.B.A.<\/strong> (chair for the Research Operations and Administration SIG).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The participation of our leaders at ACTS TS26 underscores the Wright Center\u2019s<\/strong> visibility and influence within the national translational science landscape. By sharing these insights with other CTSA hubs, the Wright Regional Center is not only participating in the national research agenda\u2014it is setting the standard for how institutions and communities work together to create a healthier future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Wright Center\u2019s own Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S. and Leah Gregory, M.P.H., M.S.W. brought VCU\u2019s innovative community engagement strategies to a national audience of peer institutions. They presented at the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS) annual conference, Translational Science 2026 (TS26), one of the most significant annual gatherings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,70,68,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-community-engagement","category-evaluation","category-impact","category-twd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3516,"date":"2026-04-24T15:29:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T15:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3516"},"modified":"2026-04-23T15:37:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T15:37:35","slug":"nih-update-besh-studies-no-longer-classified-as-clinical-trials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/04\/24\/nih-update-besh-studies-no-longer-classified-as-clinical-trials\/","title":{"rendered":"Important NIH Update: BESH Studies Will No Longer Be Classified as Clinical Trials"},"content":{"rendered":"\n A policy change effective for funding opportunities with due dates on or after May 25, 2026 affects how certain human studies are categorized \u2014 and funded.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The NIH has announced that Basic Experimental Studies with Humans (BESH)<\/strong> will no longer be classified as clinical trials<\/a>. This is a significant shift that affects how investigators apply for funding and whether their studies must be registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This change applies to any funding opportunity with a due date on or after May 25, 2026<\/strong>. Studies already registered on ClinicalTrials.gov under the current rules are not affected<\/strong> by this change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is an NIH Clinical Trial?<\/strong> NIH defines a clinical trial as a research study in which one or more human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions (which may include placebo or other control) to evaluate the effects of those interventions on health-related biomedical or behavioral outcomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is a BESH Study?<\/strong> A Basic Experimental Study with Humans (BESH) is a study that prospectively assigns human participants to conditions but does so to study basic aspects of phenomena (such as biological, psychological, or social processes) \u2014 without<\/strong> a specific intent to inform a clinical health outcome. Previously, BESH studies met the NIH clinical trial definition and had to be submitted accordingly. Going forward, they will not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For detailed definitions and examples, visit the NIH resource page: Is My Project a Clinical Trial, Basic Experimental Study Involving Humans (BESH), or an Observational Study Involving Humans?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are submitting a new grant application:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n An important rule of thumb:<\/strong> If your funding opportunity announcement designates the study as a clinical trial, your study is a clinical trial<\/strong> \u2014 regardless of whether you believe it meets the BESH definition. The funding opportunity designation is what governs registration and reporting requirements at our institution. When in doubt, err on the side of registration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your study is already registered on ClinicalTrials.gov:<\/strong> No action is required. This policy change does not affect studies already registered under current rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your study is funded by a funding opportunity with a due date from now until May 24, 2026: <\/strong>It will follow the old registration requirements and will require studies meeting the BESH definition to be registered as a clinical trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all investigators are aware of how their studies are classified \u2014 and this change adds a new layer to that determination. Some studies that were previously submitted and funded as clinical trials may now be categorized differently going forward. If you are planning a new submission, it is worth reviewing your study design against both the NIH clinical trial definition and the BESH definition before selecting a funding opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you receive funding under a clinical trial opportunity, ClinicalTrials.gov registration and results reporting requirements still apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are unsure how this change applies to your study, please reach out to our team at cctrctgov@vcu.edu<\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong>We’re here to help you navigate these definitions before you submit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A policy change effective for funding opportunities with due dates on or after May 25, 2026 affects how certain human studies are categorized \u2014 and funded. What’s Changing? The NIH has announced that Basic Experimental Studies with Humans (BESH) will no longer be classified as clinical trials. This is a significant shift that affects how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2324,"featured_media":3517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clinical-trials","category-funding","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":3512,"date":"2026-04-21T15:49:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T15:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/?p=3512"},"modified":"2026-04-21T19:58:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T19:58:37","slug":"celebrating-our-2026-wright-center-service-award-honorees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/2026\/04\/21\/celebrating-our-2026-wright-center-service-award-honorees\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Our 2026 Wright Center Service Recognition Honorees"},"content":{"rendered":"\n The Wright Center is proud to recognize the dedication and hard work of our team members who will be honored at VCU\u2019s Annual Service Recognition Celebration<\/a><\/strong> on Tuesday, April 28, 2026 at the Siegel Center. These individuals have contributed their time, talent, and passion to advancing research and innovation, making a lasting impact on the Wright Center and the communities we serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Vice President for Research and Innovation P. Srirama Rao, Ph.D., recently noted, what our team members do matters and helps produce locally relevant, nationally prominent, and globally recognized research focused on lifting lives and addressing society’s most vexing challenges. We thank them for their incredible hard work and dedication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We celebrate our colleagues achieving service milestones this year:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Harrell Collaboration: A VCU First in PDX Innovation<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Circling Back: The Road to the Ph.D.<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Olex the Educator: Cultivating a Bioinformatics Community<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
At the Crossroads: A Philosophy of Translational Science<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What Comes Next: Staying in the VCU Family<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A Double Win for Breast Cancer Research<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.vcu.edu\/cctr\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1114\/2026\/05\/1777521447612-768x1024.jpg\")
Building Bridges with Big Data<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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Mentorship and the Future of Women\u2019s Health<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
About Women\u2019s Health Research Day<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Bridge Between Bench and Bedside<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Building Bridges Across Disciplines<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Following the Data: From Oral Inflammation to Cellular Aging<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Paying It Forward<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The 2026 awardees and their projects:<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Advocating for the Future of Translational Science<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Evaluating the “Heart” of Research<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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A Center-Wide Contribution<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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National Visibility and Leadership<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What’s Changing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Key Definitions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What Does This Mean for Investigators?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
Why Does This Matter?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Questions?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Honoring Our Long-Serving Team Members<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n