New Grants Fund Studies on Stress, Disparities

Columbia Nursing faculty have received over $9 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for two new studies and an ongoing data science and health informatics training program. 

Elizabeth Corwin, PhD, vice dean of strategic and innovative research, received $3,467,404 from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities for her five-year study, which will test whether a 10-week live music intervention can reduce stress and the risk of preterm birth in pregnant Black women. Corwin and her colleague Joanne Loewy, director of the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine at Mt. Sinai Beth Israel in New York City, will compare how the music intervention and a 10-week verbal sham control affect the metabolites and metabolic pathways associated with chronic stress. 

Lusine Poghosyan, PhD, Stone Foundation and Elise D. Fish Professor of Nursing, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and executive director, Center for Healthcare Delivery Research and Innovation, was awarded $3,124,761 by the National Institutes of Nursing Research (NINR) for her study, “Enhancing Nurse Practitioner Primary Care Delivery to Address Social Determinants of Health and Reduce Health Disparities: a mixed-methods national study.” The four-year project will investigate how social determinants of health impact racial and ethnic disparities in quality-of-care processes and outcomes among older people receiving care from NP practices. It will also examine whether NP care environments moderate the impact of social determinants on health disparities.  

Rebecca Schnall, PhD ’09, Mary Dickey Lindsay Professor of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (in Nursing) and Professor of Population and Family Health, and Suzanne Bakken, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Alumni Professor of the School of Nursing, and director of the Center for Community-Engaged Health Informatics and Data Science, received a five-year, $2,646,073 grant from NINR for the Reducing Health Disparities through Informatics Pre- and Post-doctoral Training Program (RHeaDI). The program, now in its 21st year of continuous funding, provides mentoring and financial support to enable eight trainees to gain competencies in data science and health informatics research focused on health equity.