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April 19, 2011

CICATS Pilot Fund Awards

I am pleased to announce the results of the first round of our CICATS Pilot Fund Competition. The purpose of this program is to provide pilot funds to support cutting-edge clinical and translational research. Investigators with a rank of Assistant Professor or higher at the UConn Health Center, UConn-Storrs or CICATS partnering institutions were eligible to apply.

A request for pilot grant applications was announced on November 1, 2010. In response to this solicitation, nearly 70 letters of intent were received and 37 investigators were invited to submit a full proposal. The full applications were reviewed on March 16, 2011 by a distinguished panel of clinical and basic researchers chaired by Dr. Victor Hesselbrock.

The six awardees who will share the $250,000 in support include:

  • Dr. Michael Blechner, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, School of Medicine, "Leveraging an HIE Infrastructure to Build a Clinical Research Data Warehouse."
  • Dr. Jessica Clement, Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, "The Prognostic Significance of SATB1 Expression in Bladder Cancer and Its Role in Cisplatin Chemoresistance."
  • Dr. Sam Dadras, Assistant Professor, Department of Dermatology and Genetics and Developmental Biology, School of Medicine, “Sequencing Human Dicer Gene in Cutaneous Melanoma.”
  • Dr. Anthony T. Vella, Associate Professor, Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, "Revealing a Functional Role for Intestinal T Cells in Inflammatory Bowel Disease."
  • Dr. Xiaoyan Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, "Automated Discovery of Novel Adverse Drug Events: An Informatics Approach Using Comprehensive Electronic Health Records."
  • Dr. Stefano Zanotti (St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center), Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, "Notch Signaling as a Potential Target for the Treatment of Osteoarthritis."

Please join me in congratulating these outstanding clinical and translational research awardees.

Cato T. Laurencin, M.D., Ph.D.
Vice President for Health Affairs
Dean, UConn School of Medicine