This Week @ Gillings: The Abstract

August 16, 2021

Whether you’re local or global, student or alumni, the Abstract’s weekly news digest will help you stay in the loop with our amazing Gillings School community.

COVID ‘Fast Grants’ sped up pandemic science

What happened when an economics researcher, a bioengineer and a tech entrepreneur joined forces in a pandemic? Their “Fast Grants” program hugely accelerated COVID-19 science.

Dr. Lisa Gralinksi

Dr. Lisa Gralinksi

Dr. Timothy Sheahan

Dr. Timothy Sheahan

They envisaged a research-grant system with an application form that can be completed in less than 30 minutes, a decision-making process that takes just 48 hours and funding that arrives within a week — and then set up the system in 10 days, using donations from philanthropists. The founders have released the results of a survey about how the speedy funding benefited scientists’ work in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and how conventional routes of funding might be overly bureaucratic.

Assistant Professors Lisa Gralinski, PhD, and Timothy Sheahan, PhD, were both recipients of a Fast Grant. Read more about how it funded their COVID-19 research.

Read the full article in Nature.


Summer Undergraduate Pipeline brings Antoine to Gillings School

The Graduate School’s Diversity and Student Success program recently held its annual Summer Undergraduate Pipeline (SUP) program, a unique 10-week recruitment initiative designed provide tools necessary for successful transition into graduate education at UNC-Chapel Hill. SUP leadership works with undergraduate research programs at Carolina to create connections and to provide tools in order to recruit top undergraduate students as they consider graduate studies.

Siani Antoine

Siani Antoine

2019 SUP participant Siani Antoine decided to attend graduate school at Carolina, in part because of the opportunities offered by the program. Antoine realized she wanted to pursue avenues other than research—which she realized thanks to mentors from the program.

“It taught me that I didn’t want to do research,” Antoine said. “I knew I didn’t want to apply for my Ph.D., but I did want to do health-related work.”

Antoine is now a master’s degree student at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she studies the history of medicine in underrepresented communities. She hopes to better understand how health care policies have evolved over time in order to provide insights as changes are made to dismantle systemic racism in health care.

“History influences our mindsets and our experiences,” Antoine said. “It’s so important to see representation in the spaces we’re in.”

Antoine, who is from Raleigh, said the SUP program also helped her sharpen professional skills, such as in writing, research, and presentation.

Read the full article from The Graduate School.


Jaff publishes article on use of chemical weapons

Dr. Dilshad Jaff

Dr. Dilshad Jaff

Gillings Humanitarian Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor Dilshad Jaff, MD, MPH, has published a new article in Taylor and Francis Online on the effect of chemical weapon usage in places like Halabja, a Kurdish city in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). The chemical attack on Halabja happened in March of 1988, but many survivors still suffer.

More than 5,000 died and about 10,000, mostly women and children, were injured and crossed the border fleeing to Iran. Families died all together and neighborhoods were wiped out completely. The level of destruction was so massive that, until now, it is challenging to overcome the trauma and re-establish the community to offer a normal life to the survivors. At present, 76 families are still searching for their 142 lost children mainly in Iran, of which only eight have been found so far through DNA testing since the attack.

“In a world where complex humanitarian crises are on the rise and with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is too easy to move on to the next crisis and forget survivors of atrocities,” Jaff wrote. “However, it is vitally important to draw attention to the needs of survivors of atrocities. The long-term mental health effects of these devastating chemical weapons have not been studied in the KRI to capture the struggle of the survivors.”

Read the full article online.

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