OIBR Fellow Receives NIH New Innovator Award

OIBR Fellow, Katie Ehrlich, assistant professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of Psychology, recently received $2.3 million for the Director’s New Innovator Award from the National Institute of Health Common Fund’s High-Risk, High Reward Research program. This new UGA research project seeks to determine whether stressful life experiences have a more immediate effect on children’s health and will implement a new approach to examine how stress exposure is linked to children’s antibody response to vaccination.

Dr. Ehrlich, the principal investigator on the project, noted that the project’s plans came together relatively quickly because of unique resources on the UGA campus. For example, all data collection for the study will take place at the Clinical and Translational Research Unit on the UGA Health Sciences campus and the project will also be relying on two centers on campus – the Center for Family Research (an Owens Institute for Behavioral Research center) and the Center for Vaccines and Immunology.

“Our research is interdisciplinary, and we’re grateful to these centers for helping us carry out complex studies that lie at the intersection of social and biomedical science,” Ehrlich said.

The NIH Common Fund New Innovator Award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators who are within ten years of their final degree and have not received a research grant or equivalent NIH grant. The program catalyzes scientific discovery by supporting exciting, high-risk research proposals that may struggle in the traditional peer review process despite their transformative potential.

To read about more this exciting research, go here.