Fifteen teams of Brown faculty researchers have received a total of $350,000 from the University’s new COVID-19 Research Seed Fund. Brown established the fund to fast track innovative research proposals that directly address the urgent needs of the COVID-19 pandemic. The awards will support research with the potential for significant and rapid impact on human health and research that could create products of immediate need for the healthcare system in Rhode Island and the nation.
Professor Mark Lurie of the Brown University Department of Epidemiology: “Rhode Island is shining a light into the dark in a way that very few other states are doing."
"Rhode Island gives the appearance of a state where the coronavirus is a fire raging, the average number of daily infections more than quadrupling since the start of this month.
What is a peak? How do epidemiologists measure it? Why is it important? When will it come? As the novel coronavirus spreads across the world, Professor Mark Lurie of the Brown University Department of Epidemiology helps explain the term and its use in understanding the virus.
A new study, co-authored by Professor Stephen McGarvey, estimating the size of the Samoan population using contemporary genomic data found that the founding population remained low for the first 1,500 years of human settlement, contributing to understanding the evolutionary context of the recent rise in obesity and related diseases.
Professor Mark Lurie of the Brown University Department of Epidemiology on making sense of COVID-19 updates in a NY Time article: “The new cases or deaths each day are given as exact numbers, and we’re trained to take that at face value. But those are far from exact, they’re deeply flawed, and their meaning varies from place to place and from time period to time period.”
Professor Mark Lurie and other experts speak to the NY Times, weighing in to explain how differences across populations and health systems create challenges for estimating the coronavirus risk: “Since most cases are mild, and testing has not been universal, almost by definition we are failing to detect and therefore count all of the cases."
Jennifer Pellowski, PhD, Assistant Professor if Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Omar Galárraga, PhD, Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice, have been selected for an NIH training program at The Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health (TIDIRH). The program is a semester long online training course that culminates in a 2 day in-person workshop in January in Bethesda. The application process is very competitive and they are 2 of the 54 investigators who were chosen nationwide.
Multiple Brown University International Health Institute Professors are coauthors on the recently published study contributing to the understanding of the impact of integrated care to the health care of HIV-positive patients with comorbid hypertension
Read Professor Galarraga's recent article, "Conditional economic incentives to improve HIV prevention and treatment in low-income and middle-income countries."
