Gary Bennett has been awarded a five-year $2.6 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases to implement an obesity treatment in community health centers. Bennett and his research team will test a novel eHealth weight loss program that includes interactive self-monitoring and feedback, counseling calls and provider counseling. The study will be conducted through Piedmont Health, a community health system in rural North Carolina.
DGHI faculty member Michael Haglund has received a $40,000 grant from Synthes U.S.A. to support the travel of two Duke medical teams to Uganda and Rwanda, along with the shipment of supplies for 30-35 surgeries. The 15-member medical teams are training Ugandan and Rwandan medical professionals in spine instrumentation and craniotomies while the patient is awake. The effort is part of the Duke East Africa Neurosurgery Program, a twinning program that combines delivery of surplus equipment and surgical training camps.
Sara LeGrand, a research scholar at the Center for Health Policies and Inequalities Research, has received a four-year $1.9 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She will explore a novel internet and mobile phone HIV intervention for young black men in North Carolina who have sex with men. The mobile phone-based platform is designed to deliver tailored and personalized feedback with the goal of preventing HIV and sexually-transmitted infections for this group.
DGHI faculty member Christina Meade has been awarded a two-year $287,230 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to continue her work on HIV risk behaviors among methamphetamine users in South Africa. Meade and her research team will study the patterns and severity of drug use among meth users in Cape Town and its influence on HIV sexual risk behavior. The research will help inform future interventions that address both drug use and prevention of HIV/AIDS.
Meade has also been awarded a $13,861 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to further her research on the neurobehavioral effects of cocaine dependence and HIV infection. The funding supports two interns, Kia King (a senior at Duke) and Brianna Ali (a sophomore at Xavier University), who will work on the ongoing study examining the impact of drug abuse on behavioral and clinical outcomes among more than 150 individuals living with or at high risk for HIV/AIDS. The research team is interested in how these diseases affect their behavior and decision making. Innovatively combining behavioral and cognitive neuroscience techniques, they hope that results will shed light on the mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by risk taking and impulsivity.
Lynne Messer has received a two-year $410,714 grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study the health and well-being of orphaned and abandoned youth. The goal of the research is to assess how the social networks of these children might impact education attainment, employment and sexual risk behavior. This project is part of the Positive Outcomes for Orphans Study at Duke.
DGHI Medical Instructor Liz Turner has received a nine-month $18,954 grant from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to conduct an independent statistical analysis for a study that evaluates the impact of malaria control and enhanced literacy instruction on health and education among Kenyan school children. The Health and Literacy Intervention (HALI) involves more than 5,000 children in 101 schools on the southeast coast of Kenya. Turner’s evaluation will also determine which factors, if any, contribute to the study’s effectiveness.
