Kudos to Affiliates of NC TraCS

Three NC TraCS researchers featured as UNC "Meet a Tar Heel"

Giselle Corbie-Smith

Giselle Corbie-Smith, M.D., wasn’t drawn to medicine from the start. She jokes that when her mother urged her to consider medical school, she responded as any typical teenager would.

She ran in the opposite direction.

“I was initially attracted to both the intellectual side of medicine and also the social contract that physicians have with society to help in a way that is intensely personal,” says Corbie-Smith. A professor of social medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill, she also directs the Community Engagement Core at the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, which helps move scientific discoveries to practical use. NC TraCS is one of 55 academic centers funded by the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards.

Corbie-Smith has spent the better part of her career upholding that social contract, by trying to understand and eliminate the health disparities that can exist between the haves and the have-nots.

Her primary focus while at UNC-Chapel Hill has been on how to engage communities of color appropriately in research.

One of her studies, Project GRACE, trains youth as lay health advisors to go into their communities and combat misinformation about HIV infection. Another study, Project LeARN, spearheaded with UNC geneticist Bob Sandler, examines the concerns of African Americans about participating in genetic research.

She has been honored for her efforts thus far with the Leadership in Health Disparities Research award from the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities and at UNC with the James E. Bryan Award for Public Service and the Jefferson Pilot Fellowship in Academic Medicine. And she is not slowing down any time soon.

“It is incredibly rewarding to have an impact even on just one person in the clinic,” says Corbie-Smith, who also sees patients in a community health center in Carrboro, “and then to take your work on a larger scale to make a difference in an entire a community. I am so grateful to have this amazing job.”

From Meet a Tar Heel

Betsy Sleath

Betsy Sleath, Ph.D., is a contented, albeit very busy woman. She’s taken in a lot of changes and taken on some larger responsibilities that weren’t in her original career and life plans. Yet she describes them with a candor laced with a sense of humor that helps demonstrate why she is able to manage it all. That and her devotion to team work.

This might explain, in part, how a young girl who planned to be a community pharmacist in a small town in Connecticut wound up in academia wearing a virtual rack full of hats.

Sleath, as new chair of the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, also leads two major NIH grants, one on asthma and one on glaucoma, both dealing with device or medication use. Her interest in Latino health inspires her work within the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, UNC’s NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA).

These various roles stem from life experience: She remembered her mother’s diabetic coma as a young child and began to wonder how doctors communicate with patients about their disease. Her mother also served as a role model working as a clerk in a community pharmacy.

An elective course in pharmacy school led to a double-major in pharmacy and sociology. Her preference for people contact over labs led her to work in provider-patient communication and, thus, her research program.

“My main motivation is to be able to help people like my mom,” she says.

From Meet a Tar Heel

Weili Lin

Few people can say they have turned their favorite childhood hobby into a career. But Weili Lin, Ph.D., still spends his days taking pictures, just as he did as a kid. Only now the images he captures are of the developing brain, not rocks and dragonflies.

Lin, director of the UNC Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC), uses his passion for photography to devise innovative approaches to capture the body’s internal structures.

“There are so many different parameters you can play with, just like when you take pictures you can adjust the parameters to see things in a completely different way,” says Lin.

His own research has used the latest imaging technology to chart the course of brain development in some of the tiniest of research subjects, babies from two weeks old to two years of age. Propelled by funding from the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) at UNC (NC TraCS Institute), although more studies are needed, Lin has found that several major neural wiring may be present in babies earlier than what have been thought previously.

He plans to conduct similar studies to see how development could differ between normal subjects and those at risk for neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia or autism.

“I spend a lot of time looking at how improvements in technology can help us address fundamental biological questions, and that is fun to me,” Lin says. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

From Meet a Tar Heel

UNC researcher receives top award for young scientists

A UNC pharmacology researcher will receive the highest award from the U.S. government for early career scientists and engineers next month.

Thomas L. Kash, assistant professor in the department of pharmacology and the UNC Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, will be awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Kash will be recognized for the promise he has demonstrated as a scientist and his research program on the effects of alcohol on neural circuits in the brain.

The award was given to 94 researchers and will be presented at the White House in October, along with a monetary grant to continue research.

From the Daily Tar Heel.