NIH Cuts End Influential Fellowship for Nursing Scientists
Professor Suzanne Bakken, PhD, founder of Columbia Nursing’s Reducing Health Disparities Through Informatics (RHeaDI) program and director for its first 20 years, has seen it flourish and produce many leaders in the burgeoning field of nursing informatics.
“A key secret of our success is the emphasis on training nursing scientists for interdisciplinary research in informatics, which is increasingly called human-centered AI,” says Bakken, who is vice dean of strategic and innovative research at the nursing school.
To date, 32 PhDs and 23 postdocs have completed the fellowship. Nursing scientists funded by or affiliated with RHeaDI have collectively secured over $100 million in federal research funding.
Just one recent example of the program’s influence: Five of the authors of the breakthrough CONCERN trial, published April 2 in Nature Medicine, are RHeaDI alums.
Conducted across two large hospital systems in nearly 60,000 hospitalized patients, the trial showed that an AI tool that analyzes nursing documentation patterns flagged patients at risk of decline up to 42 hours earlier than standard methods, reducing mortality by nearly 36%.
Generations of RHeaDI alums
CONCERN’s lead author, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Columbia Nursing Associate Professor Sarah Rossetti, PhD ’09, is herself one of Bakken’s trainees, making her one of Bakken’s many academic grandchildren, and underscoring the generational effect of the RHeaDI program.
“It really takes a mature and well-resourced training program to produce the type of scientists that can do this sophisticated, computational-driven, complex intervention work,” says Bakken. “And I’m so proud that we’ve been able to train these people. Two people affiliated with our program are now leading NIH-funded T32 training programs.”
Professor Rebecca Schnall, PhD ’09, associate dean, faculty development, is an international leader in consumer and public health informatics and has been RHeaDI’s director since 2022. Schnall got her start working as an employee on Bakken’s grants while completing her PhD at Columbia Nursing. Her own research program focuses on improving health information access for people living with or at risk for HIV, and she has led the development of several mobile health tools to support health behavior change in underserved populations.
RHeaDI alumna Young Ji Lee, PhD ’13, leads a T32 program at the University of Pittsburgh focused on technology in nursing. Her research addresses improving the delivery of health information through individually tailored AI systems. Most recently, she led the development of a hybrid recommender system designed to support ovarian cancer patients in navigating online health resources.
Other RHeaDI alums among Columbia Nursing’s faculty include Professor Ruth Masterson Creber, PhD and Assistant Professor Melissa Beauchemin, PhD ’19.
“It’s a fun thing when we attend conferences and alums will introduce an individual to me by saying, ‘I want you to meet your academic grandmother, or your academic great-grandmother,’” Bakken says. “We just have a really nice lineage of people who are just superstars who got their start with us.”
Training grant terminated
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant supporting RHeaDI was among 20 terminated at Columbia Nursing in early March, when the Trump administration pulled $400 million in research funding from Columbia University. Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons also lost several training grants.
It was “particularly hard” to lose the RHeaDI grant, says Bakken, who calls it the “crown jewel” among multiple federal and institutional resources supporting training activities at Columbia Nursing. “I wrote this grant in 2001 during my first year at Columbia, with Professor Schnall taking over as its leader in 2022. It’s had continuous funding for 23 years, and so it’s really hard to think about it being gone,” she says.
“One of the things we sometimes talk about is a deletion effect, what would the field look like if we had not been in it,” Bakken adds. “I would argue that it would look very different, that the role of nursing scientists in human-centered AI would be much less recognized. And I worry very much about that for the future, when we think about issues related to AI that’s not sufficiently human-centered.”
Then, she asks, where will we find individuals with the expertise necessary to provide leadership in addressing these complex issues? “Because normally, they would be coming from us.”