The Log | School News
NIH Awards $1.78 Million 'Roadmap' Grant to Duke Center
for Geospatial Medicine
The Nicholas School has received a $1.78 million National
Institutes of Health grant to launch the Duke
Center for Geospatial Medicine. The grant was
awarded by NIH’s Roadmap Initiative, which promotes research
in new or emerging fields of critical importance to future
medical and scientific progress.
Scientists at the new center will combine expertise in psychology,
geospatial technology, molecular biology, genetic epidemiology,
genomics, behavioral science and spatial statistics to craft
powerful new tools to study the interplay of genetic, environmental
and social factors that drive children’s health outcomes.
The center’s initial study will focus on understanding how
these factors combine to cause neural tube defects.
“What researchers need—and what our center will work to
provide—are wholly new methods for assessing the factors’
simultaneous, combined influence,” says Marie
Lynn Miranda, Gabel Associate Professor of the
Practice in Environmental Ethics and Sustainable Environmental
Management and director of the Children’s
Environmental Health Initiative at the Nicholas School.
“The tools currently at our disposal to do this type of research
are rooted in different disciplines and typically study each
factor in isolation,” she explains. Miranda will serve as
principal investigator and director of the new center.
The methods advanced at the center could be applied to studies
of other childhood health problems such as autism, asthma,
ADHD and obesity, she says. They also could be extended to
adult conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s
disease, psychiatric disorders and cardiovascular disease.
A key component of the new methods will be their use of advanced
spatial statistical techniques and Geographic Information
Systems applications.
To support its interdisciplinary approach, the center will
leverage research partnerships among the Nicholas School,
the Duke University Medical Center and Trinity College of
Arts and Sciences. Jonathan
H. Freedman, associate professor of environmental
toxicology at the Nicholas School, and Marcy C. Speer, associate
professor at the Center for Human Genetics and the Departments
of Medicine, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and Biostatistics
and Bioinformatics, will serve as the center’s co-directors.
Alan Gelfand, professor of statistics, Christina Gibson,
assistant professor at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public
Policy, and Redford Williams, professor of psychiatry, will
serve as co-investigators.
The Duke NIH grant was one of four such grants awarded to
Triangle researchers. Three researchers at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also received NIH funding.
They are Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the Carolina
Population Center, Daniel A. Reed, Kenan Eminent Professor
and director of the Institute for Renaissance Computing, and
Ryan B. Sartor, professor of medicine.
visit the site at www.nicholas.duke.edu/cgm
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