ThinkResearch

Junaid Nabi, MD, MPH, a senior researcher at Harvard Business School, shares his research investigating healthcare access and quality of care.

Jorge Chavarro, MD, ScD, ScM, of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discusses his research studying the impact of nutrition on fertility.

Gyongi Szabo, MD, PhD, Hon. ScD, chief academic officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, discusses her research on the effects of alcohol on the liver.

Neurologist Samuel Frank, MD, discusses his work studying Huntington's disease, dystonia, and Parkinson's disease, as well as his involvement in clinical research studies to help better diagnose and treat patients with these movement disorders.

"42.4% of U.S. adults have the disease of obesity," says Fatima Cody Stanford, obesity medicine physician scientist, educator, and policy maker at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Stanford discusses her research and policy work on obesity and weight discrimination laws.

"External scientific review gives us a better chance of identifying proposals that might have a big impact on the wellbeing of our community," says Margaret Schneider, director of the Pilot Studies program at the University of California Irvine. Schneider discusses her role in the creation of the CTSA External Reviewer Exchange Consortium (CEREC), which coordinates scientific review for funding applications submitted to centers that are part of the national NIH-funded CTSA consortium, which includes Harvard Catalyst.

Florian Eichler, MD, discusses his work studying childhood cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a progressive demyelinating disease of the brain. Eichler is director of the Center for Rare Neurological Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, and part of a team that recently received pilot funding from us to improve early detection of this disease.

"Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness in the world," says David Friedman, director of the glaucoma service at Mass Eye and Ear. Friedman discusses his current Harvard Catalyst pilot grant to improve glaucoma treatment by studying a contact lens that can deliver medication.

"Hallucinations are often associated with greater delusions, which leads to poor performance in processing visual information, " says Paulo Lizano, MD, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Lizano discusses his recent Harvard Catalyst pilot grant to improve visual processing in patients with schizophrenia and other psychoses using non-invasive brain stimulation.

"For vision-impaired people, visual aids are very important and can be lifesaving," says Gang Luo, PhD, Schepens Eye Research Institute. Luo discusses the expense of these aids for patients – more than $15,000 – and his Harvard Catalyst pilot grant to develop a free smartphone app to detect myopia.