CTSA News

Virginia Commonwealth University and the Central Virginia Veterans Affairs Health Care System have received a five-year T32 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health to prepare postdoctoral fellows to conduct research using large healthcare datasets.

The $1.2 million award comes from NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and is a complementary grant to VCU's Clinical and Translational Science Award, held by the Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science. It is the second complementary T32 award the Wright Center has received since 2023.

"Securing a second complementary T32 award underscores the Wright Center’s commitment to translational science workforce development in Virginia," said F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., director of the Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science. "By equipping scholars to navigate complex real-world data, this grant will help accelerate the translation of discovery into cutting-edge health solutions in real-world settings."

"VCU’s more than 70-year partnership with the Richmond VA Medical Center remains one of our greatest strengths, and we are deeply grateful for their continued collaboration on this initiative,” said P. Srirama Rao, Ph.D., vice president for research and innovation. “By bringing together the Wright Center, the VCU Center for Rehabilitation Science and Engineering, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, and stellar faculty mentors from multiple schools across VCU’s campuses, this ongoing joint effort ensures we can deliver transformative training across both institutions."

“Our partnership with VCU continues to create opportunities to advance research, develop future leaders and improve the care we provide to veterans,” said Jim Dudley, Acting Executive Director of the Central Virginia VA Health Care System. “This investment in the next generation of researchers will help transform data and discovery into meaningful improvements in veteran health care.”

Seeking evidence-based insights

Leading the program as co-principal investigators are David X. Cifu, M.D., chair of the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation in the VCU School of Medicine, and Amol Karmarkar, Ph.D., professor and director of the VCU Center for Rehabilitation Science and Engineering Data Hub. Both Cifu and Karmarkar have joint appointments with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, with Cifu serving as senior traumatic brain injury specialist for the department and Karmarkar serving as a research data scientist at the Richmond VA Medical Center.

Fellows will be "mentored by an all-star roster of big data analytics investigators and researchers from VCU, the Richmond VA Medical Center and our amazing collaborators nationally,” Cifu said. The program, he said, will help "train the next generation of researchers to enhance care for service members, veterans and civilians."

The datasets that will be available to the new T32 trainees are among the largest in U.S. health care. The VA Corporate Data Warehouse holds detailed health care records on approximately 25 million veterans spanning the past 25 years, with roughly 4 billion additional data points added each day. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services datasets, housed at VCU through the Center for Rehabilitation Science and Engineering Data Hub, cover more than 65 million Americans enrolled annually in Medicare programs.

"Medicine has shifted from relying solely on individual judgment to leveraging evidence-based insights from millions of patient records,” Karmarkar said. “Real-world data holds incredible potential to reveal life-saving patterns, but few researchers are trained to harness it. This grant from the NIH directly targets that critical skill gap by training the next generation of researchers to translate big data into better patient outcomes."

Mentors representing a range of disciplines

Fellows will also have access to the database built by the Long-term Impact of Military-relevant Brain Injury Consortium–Chronic Effects of Neurotrauma Consortium, a $116.7 million national program Cifu leads. That database draws on nine federal datasets covering 2.5 million veterans and service members. Karmarkar leads the data core for the VA Brain Health Coordinating Center, which coordinates brain health interventions across the VA and develops analytics for VA leadership; fellows interested in that work can participate.

Mentorship spans both institutions and several disciplines. The program's data and analytics core is led by Preetam Ghosh, Ph.D., professor in the VCU Department of Computer Science in VCU’s College of Engineering; Alex Krist, M.D., professor of family medicine and population health and past chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force; and Jose Huizar, M.D., director of the device and arrhythmia clinic at the Central Virginia Veterans Affairs Health Care System. The program activities and outcomes will be evaluated periodically by Debbie DiazGranados, Ph.D., director of evaluation and team science at the Wright Center. The program will be administratively supported by the VCU Center for Rehabilitation Science and Engineering directed by Ronald Seel, Ph.D. Joshua Hahn will provide overall program coordination. 

Fellows will also work with a combination of mentors from different health domains and those with methodological expertise from the VCU schools of Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Public Health; the College of Engineering; the College of Health Professions; and Central Virginia Veterans Affairs Health Care System. Together, program mentors hold $20 million in active annual research funding.