Joshua Jacobs, MD, Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM) Director and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at RUSH University Medical Center, was awarded the 2024 William W. Tipton Jr., MD, Leadership Award by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). The award is AAOS’ highest leadership honor.
Jacobs, the William A. Hark, MD, Susanne G. Swift Professor at RUSH, is a nationally recognized leader in orthopaedics. With the award, the AAOS recognized his many years of service to the field and the community he serves.
“It is a distinctive honor to receive this award. I had the great fortune of working with Dr. Tipton early in my career, when I was ‘learning the ropes’ of AAOS volunteer service,” Jacobs said. “He was an inspirational leader, who had the ability to evoke the best qualities in people, motivating service for a higher cause.”
The Sociome Data Commons – a platform designed by the Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM) and other partners to explore how non-medical factors like the environment impacts people’s health – was recently featured in a study published in The Journal of Clinical and Translational Science.
The ITM defines the “sociome” as encompassing all the social, environmental, psychological, and behavioral factors that influence health. Often, these are related to where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age. These aspects of humans’ lives impact their health and have nothing to do with a medical chart – and includes traditionally understood social determinants of health along with many other features of lived lives, like exposure to sunshine, noise, trees, and more.
The publication outlines the key features and illustrates the potential impact of this scalable tool through a pilot study of asthma in children living on the South Side of Chicago.
The researchers found that that things like housing conditions and violence worsened children’s asthma.
The article, authored by sociome experts, computer scientists, informaticists, data scientists, and clinicians from multiple ITM institutions, emphasizes the importance of considering social determinants of health when doing research that helps advance health equity.
“This new tool helps investigators use big data technology to make discoveries that could reveal how which aspects of daily living most importantly impact health,” said Sam Volchenboum, MD, PhD, MS, Associate Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine for Informatics. “This asthma pilot study is just the start, and we’re excited to share this platform with others to fuel many more findings to come.”
ITM-UChicago researchers’ findings regarding urgent medical care decisions offered to critically ill patients during the COVID-19 pandemic were published in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine®. Alexandra Tate, PhD, Research Director in the Section of Hospital Medicine, along with Ethan Molitch-Hou, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, and their team found that during the pandemic doctors were more likely to document code status preferences for their patients. This increase in documentation was observed for both COVID patients and those without COVID. Their research suggests the increase for COVID patients was likely due to consistent and clear protocols in the COVID unit and uncertainty about the disease, while spillover effects of the behavior help explain the increase for non-COVID patients. Tate credits an ITM Core Subsidy Award that she and Molitch-Hou received in 2021 for helping make the work possible.
A new program from the Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM) provides special training to the public and researchers on teaming up to do powerful studies – and gives $25,000 to teams of community members and researchers who pair up to tackle health issues in ways that resonate with the public.
Many health research projects study specific communities, but they often don’t have a team member from that community involved in the study design from day one. This can lead to everything from study meeting times that don’t work for that group of people to bigger issues that could’ve easily been avoided, had they been involved. This new program spearheaded by ITM-Illinois Tech helps solve that problem, by providing an opportunity for researchers and community members to team up and do powerful studies to improve people’s health together. It’s led by both researchers AND community members.
“Diversity does not mean studying more people,” said Patrick Corrigan, PsyD, the ITM-Illinois Tech site leader and Distinguished Professor of Psychology. “Diversity means partnering with more communities. This is an opportunity for ITM researchers to partner with community members and health concerns of interest to specific communities. ITM 3.0 is meant to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is the absolute grassroots way of doing it.”
The Inspiring Change Research Training Program is made of up three parts – training for community members, training for researchers, and funding for teams sparked from both trainings.
The Community-Engaged Research Seminar: Pipeline to Funding is a four-session training for researchers on conducting community-engaged research. Corrigan and Lindsay Sheehan, PhD, Assistant Professor, will be leading the training. Afterward researchers will have the opportunity to partner with a community member and apply for the Inspiring Change Pilot Grant Awards Program, which offers $25,000 and a more in-depth training on community-engaged research. This training and funding is open to people from all six ITM institutions.
The community members will be pulled from the Community Leaders Institute, which kicks off on May 17. Members of the public will get a four-week training on health research, how it impacts their communities, and how they can get involved in the study design process. Attendees will get up to $500 for participating, depending on how much of the training they attend. Illinois Tech’s Karyn Bolden Stovall and Elliott Morris will be leading this training.
“This training and this type of research process is designed to give the community an equal in say in research that happens in their community, to be leaders of designing interventions that will ultimately impact their communities,” said Stovall, who has been an active community member herself. “It’s designed specifically to provide them with equal power in the research structure.”
Both groups will come together on June 8th for a matchmaking event!
The deadline for both opportunities is 5:00 p.m. on May 10th.
Questions? Contact Karyn Bolden Stovall at kstovall@iit.edu.
A CNN article featured new findings from an ITM-supported RUSH University study that showed the brain health benefits from following the Mediterranean-Dash Diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, or the MIND diet.
The study examined the brains of 581 people, who donated their body to the Memory and Aging Project at RUSH. The findings reveal that those who followed the MIND diet, or a similar Mediterranean diet, had healthier brains with few signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
The MIND diet includes foods like fish, poultry, olive oil, nuts, berries, and more.
The MIND diet work at RUSH was spearheaded by Martha Clare Morris, ScD, who was the Community and Collaboration Cluster leader for ITM-RUSH until she passed away in 2020. She leveraged the ITM TRIO Studio to help enrollment in her research on healthy aging.
ITM-UChicago researcher Esra Tasali, MD, received a Clinical Research Award at the Translational Science 2023 conference for her work on sleep health and obesity. Tasali is a Professor in Medicine at UChicago Medicine and the Director of the UChicago Sleep Center. Her research found that sleeping 8.5 hours regularly helps with weight loss and keeping obesity away. Each one-hour increase in the duration of sleep was associated with a decrease in eating about 160 kcal each day, her study found.
The ITM kicked off 2023 with provoking talks at the recently launched ITM Grand Round series! Missed either of the talks? No worries! They’re now available to stream on our YouTube channel!
In February, ITM-Loyola hosted the Grand Rounds and featured a talk from site lead Elaine Morrato, MPH, DrPH, about ITM’s new Implementation Science Core and how it can help researchers.
ITM Grand Rounds in March took place at ITM-UChicago and featured a special guest from University of California-Davis, Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, MD, PhD. Aguilar-Gaxiola presented on an award-winning community-engaged model focused on advancing mental health equity.
The series is an opportunity for members from all six ITM institutions to get together in-person on a monthly basis, a rarity after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When we meet together, we’re able to have deeper and more meaningful conversations,” said Barbara Swanson, PhD, Professor, Department of Adult Health and Gerontological Nursing, College of Nursing at RUSH.
Talks are followed by a reception featuring ample snacks and beverages and plenty of chances to socialize and network.
Watch the February Grand Rounds Here
Watch the March Grand Rounds Here
Register for the upcoming Grand Rounds on April 21st Here
Subscribe to the ITM YouTube channel here so you don’t miss the latest content!
Want to be an ITM Insider? Tell us what you want to know and we'll send it direct to your Inbox.
Find Out More
Copyright © 2023 Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM). All Rights Reserved.