URMC / Clinical & Translational Science Institute / Stories / June 2023 / Announcing This Year’s KL2 Career Development Awardees

Announcing This Year’s KL2 Career Development Awardees

Each year, the UR CTSI selects a set of promising early-stage researchers for its KL2 Career Development Award Program, which provides two years of mentored research support to help awardees transition to independent careers as clinical and translational investigators. This year’s awardees will study why children with autism and ADHD have a hard time distinguishing speech in distracting environments, how to predict aneurysm progression in patients with chronic aortic dissection, the impact of supporting caregivers of children with complex medical issues, and how provide individualized care for patients with sickle cell disease.

Learn more about this year’s awardees and their projects:

Supporting Caregivers to Improve the Health of Children with Medical Complexity

Nathaniel Bayer, MD Children with medical complexity (for example a child with cerebral palsy, chronic lung disease, or a feeding tube) require around the clock care. Providing constant, complex care for these children can leave caregivers feeling stressed and socially isolated, with high rates of depression and anxiety. When caregivers struggle to cope, their children’s health is impacted.

Nathaniel Bayer, MD, a pediatric hospitalist and assistant professor of Pediatrics at URMC, is developing a peer and emotional-support intervention to help caregivers better adapt while caring for a child with medical complexity. With KL2 funding, he will refine the intervention and test its ability to improve caregiver adaptation, an established process that includes how caregivers perceive their circumstances, develop skills in meeting their child’s health needs, and access supportive resources. Ultimately, Bayer hopes that improving caregiver adaptation and well-being will also improve health outcomes for children with medical complexity.

Individualizing Care for Adults with Sickle Cell Disease

Ashley Jenkins, MD People with sickle cell disease experience frequent, extremely painful, and life-threatening episodes in which their misshapen red blood cells (a defining characteristic of the disease) block blood vessels and starve tissue of oxygen. These episodes often require hospitalization, but care – including pain management – can vary widely due to a lack of standard guidance. Though the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has recommended using individualized care plans to tailor care in these crisis situations, it’s not clear how to effectively implement these plans.

With KL2 funding, Ashley Jenkins, MD, an internal medicine and pediatric hospitalist and assistant professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, will identify barriers and facilitators to inpatient care for sickle cell disease in these crisis situations. She will then survey National Alliance for Sickle Cell Centers to identify core elements of individualized care plans that can be adopted or adapted for broad use.

Neural Mechanisms Underlying Speech-in-Noise Processing Difficulty in Autism

Emily Knight, MD, PhD Children with autism and ADHD have a hard time distinguishing speech in settings with other distracting stimuli, for example a teacher giving direction while others are talking, but we don’t know what’s happening in the brain to cause this deficit. Because watching a speaker’s lips can help in these situations, some people believe the problem lies in a stunted ability to integrate information from multiple senses (i.e. vision and sound). However, children with autism are also known to have deficits in spatial attention, which impairs their ability to watch a speaker’s lips in the first place.

With KL2 funding, Emily Knight, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience, will test typically developing children and children with autism and/or ADHD in virtual reality tasks that require multisensory integration or spatial attention, while measuring their brain activity. She will then see whether the children’s brain activity related to multisensory integration or spatial attention correlates better to their scores on a clinical test of auditory processing. Ultimately, Knight hopes this information will be used to develop better interventions that address the underlying cause of auditory processing deficits in children with autism and ADHD.

Tracking Aneurysm Progress in Patients with Aortic Dissection

Doran Mix, MD Aortic dissection is a serious condition in which the inner layer of the body’s main artery tears and obstructs blood flow to downstream organs. Patients who have chronic aortic dissection often develop fatal dissection-related aneurysms, but we currently lack ways to predict who will develop these aneurysms or when they will grow and rupture.

Doran Mix, MD, assistant professor of Vascular Surgery and Biomedical Engineering, plans to leverage KL2 support to develop such a method of prediction by measuring aorta stiffness and mechanical strain in patients with aortic dissection. First, he plans to validate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a tool to measure aortic stiffness and strain in 3D-printed aortic dissection models. Then, he will use the validated MRI method to measure aortic stiffness and strain over a six-month period in patients with aortic dissection to detect and track any aneurysms they may develop.

Mix hopes this study will lead to a larger multi-center clinical trial to determine how these data can inform surgical repair of dissection-related aneurysms.

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The KL2 Career Development Award Program is supported by the University of Rochester CTSA award number KL2 TR001999 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Michael Hazard | 6/9/2023