Kudos to Affiliates of NC TraCS

Gary Marchionini, Ph.D. receives Award of Merit.

Gary Marchionini, Ph.D., dean and distinguished professor for the UNC School of Information and Library Science and a member of the NC TraCS Internal Advisory Board, has been chosen to receive the Award of Merit.

This is the highest honor given by the American Society of Information and Science Technology.

Marchionini has been at UNC since 1998. His topics of research include digital libraries and health information technologies.

Google, IBM and Microsoft have all awarded Marchionini for his work, and he has received grant money from the National Science Foundation.

From The Daily Tar Heel, September 6, 2011.

Paula Brown Stafford receives "Women in Business" Award

Paula Brown Stafford, president of clinical development at Quintiles and a member of the NC TraCS External Advisory Board, was honored as a recipient of Triangle Business Journal's Women in Business awards for 2011.

"We are pleased and proud to have Paula recognized as a leading woman in business in the Triangle," said John Ratliff, Quintiles president and chief operating officer. "Paula has made significant contributions to the growth of Quintiles, and her current leadership role is a reflection of her dedication to making a positive difference in healthcare around the world."

Stafford joined Quintiles in 1985 as a biostatistician and the company's 23rd employee. Quintiles now employees more than 20,000 people in 60 countries. As President of Clinical Development, Stafford leads a business unit with 15,000 staff globally who are responsible for Phase I-III clinical development services, ranging from clinical monitoring to regulatory submission. In addition to her role at Quintiles, Stafford is the Chair-Elect of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), and a member of the Foundation Board of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine CTSA External Advisory Board.

The Women in Business awards program recognizes Triangle women who have proven themselves as outstanding leaders with established track records of significant accomplishments in business and community service. This year's winners were announced at an awards luncheon August 25, 2011 at the Sheraton Imperial in Durham, N.C.

From MarketWatch, August 26, 2011.

Samuel Jones accepted into NC TraCS development program

Samuel Jones, M.D., assistant professor in the department of surgery and associate director of the NC Jaycee Burn Center, was accepted to the KL2 program at the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute at UNC Chapel Hill.

The KL2 program is part of a larger group of training programs run by NC TraCS that aim to advance development in interdisciplinary clinical and translational science. This program, designed for junior-level faculty, focuses on educating participants through didactic and experiential learning in areas critical to the overall mission of the National Institute for Health.

The program's objectives, defined on their website, are to give scholars: An appreciation of diverse clinical research disciplines; An understanding of methodological and analytical concepts necessary to design rigorous clinical research; An opportunity to apply their knowledge through a mentored and independent research experience that leads to future grant proposals; and Access to support from the Shared Biostatistics Research Core for the KL2 Program.

Scholars selected to participate in the program have access to courses offered by the NC TraCS institute, including a core curriculum of required courses.

From UNC School of Medicine news.

Jeff Federspiel receives Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award

Jeff Federspiel has won a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Predoctoral MD/PhD Fellows funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. The four-year award will support him while he spends two years on his dissertation work to complete the Ph.D. and two years to finish his M.D. degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Federspiel is doing his Ph.D. work in health policy at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. His focus on how increasing outpatient cost-sharing by Medicare patients with cardiovascular disease is supported by an NC TraCS $10K pilot grant and was the subject of a story in the July NC TraCS online newsletter. He has put together a unique interdisciplinary team to look at this research question from the perspective of economists, aging researchers and clinicians. The two years of his NHLBI fellowship devoted to finishing his Ph.D. will include completion of this pilot project, as well as some cardiovascular imaging-related research.