Desert Horse-Grant is a world leader in facilitating the translation of discoveries from the lab to the clinical environment, being recently named by Modern Healthcare as one of the year's Top 25 Innovators. She launched the UCLA Health Innovation Challenge, a seed funding program that recognizes and scales innovative therapeutic, digital and device solutions as well as patient experience and performance excellence efforts. In 2019, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce announced Desert and colleagues recipients of a prestigious national i6 Challenge grant to support Regional Innovation Strategies. She and her team’s pioneering work to develop Oncoscope, a novel biotool on the analysis and visualization of linked molecular and clinical cancer data, was recognized with a social impact award by GitHub and published in Nature Genetics in 2018.