Wednesday, December 16, 2009

AHRQ Funding for Students and Fellows

This web site has links to various opportunities for US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality grants to support pre- and post-doctoral students in clinical or outcomes research.

New publicaion by recent alumna

Jennifer Otten, PhD, and a recent graduate of UVM, just had this major publication:

Effects of Television Viewing Reduction on Energy Intake and Expenditure in Overweight and Obese Adults
A Randomized Controlled Trial
Jennifer J. Otten, PhD, RD; Katherine E. Jones, MS; Benjamin Littenberg, MD; Jean Harvey-Berino, PhD, RD

Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(22):2109-2115. 

The bottom line: cutting back on TV viewing did good things for people's calorie intake and activity.

The article got some nice press attention, such as Science Daily, and US News and World Report.



Monday, December 14, 2009

Biodiversity Loss Affects Global Disease Ecology

Check out this UVM authored paper http://www.uvm.edu/giee/publications/Pongsiri_Roman%20et%20al.pdf about how human activity affects biodiversity which then impacts the rates of infectious disease. Implications for health monitoring and conservation planning are discussed. From the article,
"Effectively addressing emerging diseases
requires adequate health infrastructure that recognizes
the environmental, epidemiological, and social drivers of
disease transmission."

Great topic for seminar.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Clinical Research Oriented Workshop (CROW) Meeting: Dec 11, 2009

Clinical Research Oriented Workshop (CROW) Meeting: Dec 11, 2009

Present: Abby Crocker, Kairn Kelley, Rodger Kessler, Ben Littenberg, Connie van Eeghen
Absent: Matt Bovee, Liz Chen, Kim Dittus, Amanda Kennedy, Charlie MacLean, Maria Ramos, Alan Rubin

1. Start up: Brrrr! OK, winter is here; I’ll stop whining.

2. Roundtable, with update, short term goals, long term goals
a. Ben: Demo on how to access and update the blog. These instructions will be presented here and these notes will be copied only to the blog, after this update. So pay attention:
i. Go to http://uvmcts.blogspot.com/
You will see the contents of the blog and you can read it without signing in. If you would like to sign in, click “Sign In” in the top right hand corner and enter your e-mail address and password. Next:
ii. Click on “New Post” and add your thoughts.
This is as informal as having a hallway bulletin board or a white board on which we leave each other notes. Make the blogspot a favorite (or even your home page) and we’ll all be able to ‘find each other’ easily and quickly.

Even MORE helpfully, you will get the updated notes (and other CTS updates) automatically by e-mail if, after accessing the blogspot, you click “Click here to subscribe by Email” and enter your email address. You do not need to “sign in” in order to make this work; you just need to visit the blogspot once. This means you don’t have to remember to check the blog to get these wonderful notes. Take note!

BTW: there was a way cool link on the blogspot called: Equator Network, which is right on the home page of the blog in the right hand column providing advice and guidelines on Reporting Health Research. It features RCT and other research guidelines which even includes QI (now you know why I was interested). Sounds like its worth a visit when you get to the blog and have a little time to look around.

b. Abby: state and national datasets for secondary data analysis:
i. There are data sets available for us to browse, understand, and use; we need to view and refresh ourselves on them regularly
ii. www.sgim.org/index... provides a Research tab that lists research data sets for review. Obtaining the data, and understanding how they were put together and should be used, is another task entirely. CTS participants may have the opportunity to become experts for a particular data set; it would be good to know who in our Center has that expertise.
iii. We could work on sample projects, taking a single data set and exploring it for research in areas in which we are already interested.
iv. Students can also pair with a faculty member to explore a data set based on a topic with the goal of a submittable abstract at the end of 28 days.
v. Charlie has designed a course for grad students (special topics) the outcome of which is to understand how research and policy connect with each other. See Charlie for more details.
vi. Our work fits in a model in which our intuition may feed a qualitative study which may lead to quantitative study which may lead to an intervention based control trial which may lead to a dissemination process or change in clinical or institutional policy. This process is not usually linear and it has different levels of success: immediate change or the “anechoic” effect (no echo back). Other choices aside from academic publication: market forces, legislative, judicial, and behavioral economics are other levers for making change. What works, and why, is part of what we need to understand.

c. Kairn: Future workshop meetings in the spring semester: no change to our current day and time. We will continue to meet on Friday mornings, 9:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

3. Next Fellows Meeting(s): Dec 18, 2009 from 9:30 – 11:00 a.m., at Given Courtyard Level 4
a. Dec 18: journal club with Abby Crocker’s article to answer questions about generalized linear mixed models (no Connie – could someone else take notes?)
b. Future agenda to consider:
i. Dec 25: no Workshop
ii. Jan 1: no Workshop
iii. Jan 8: Connie – research update
iv. Skype demo: Connie & Matt? Wait until Amanda K is back. Or do twice?
v. Future: Review of different types of journal articles (lit review, case study, original article, letter to editor…), when each is appropriate, tips on planning/writing (Abby)
vi. Future: Informed consent QI: Connie to follow up with Nancy Stalnaker, Alan Rubin will follow up with Alan Wortheimer or Rob McCauly
vii. Workshop’s WIP (the history document) – discuss goals and progress, make recommendations, review and modify document, add Fellows’ orientation

4. Fellows document – nothing new this time

Recorder: Connie van Eeghen

FW: CS Grad Students Presentations

________________________________________
From: Kost, Rhonda M.
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 5:18 PM
To: Littenberg, Benjamin
Subject: CS Grad Students Presentations

I'll be doing a 20 minute presentation (Assessing Evidence of Diabetic Foot Exam by Natural Language Processing of Unstructured Clinical Notes) on Wednesday. The draft schedule had me listed just before lunch.

In case you would like to attend ....

Wednesday, Dec. 16
9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Perkins 101

CS Research Day 2009

Don't miss this conference of 13 presentations, with a keynote speech by Charles Colbourn of Arizona State University.

Funding to do research in Federal Labs

Dear Department Head:

As you may know, the National Research Council of the National Academies
sponsors a number of awards for graduate, postdoctoral and senior
researchers at federal laboratories and affiliated institutions. These
awards provide generous stipends ($42,000 - $75,000 per year for recent
Ph.D. recipients and higher for additional experience; Master's level
stipends are $38,000 per annum), and the opportunity to do independent
research in some of the best-equipped and staffed laboratories in the
U.S. Research opportunities are open to U.S. citizens, permanent
residents, and for some of the laboratories, foreign nationals.

We ask your assistance in informing students and faculty in your
department of these opportunities by copying this message to each one.

Detailed program information, including instructions on how to apply
online and a list of participating laboratories, is available on the NRC
Research Associateship Programs Web site at:

*www.national-academies.org/rap
<http://pull.xmr3.com/p/1327-533E/82473459/http-www.national-academies.org-rap.html>*

Questions should be directed to the NRC at 202-334-2760 (phone) or
rap@nas.edu <mailto:rap@nas.edu>.

There are four review cycles annually. Deadline dates for 2010 are:

February 1, 2010
May 1, 2010
August 1, 2010
November 1, 2010

Applicants should begin a dialogue with prospective Advisers at the lab
as early as possible, before their anticipated application deadline.

Thank you for your assistance.

Sincerely yours,
H. Ray Gamble
Director of the Fellowship Programs
National Research Council
The National Academies
5000 5th Street NW, Keck 568
Washington, DC 20001

SGIM Research Dataset Compendium

The SGIM Research Dataset Compendium is designed to assist investigators conducting research on existing datasets, with a particular emphasis on health services research, clinical epidemiology, and research on medical education. The detailed information provided by the SGIM compendium distinguishes it from other web-based compendia, which typically provide lists of datasets but give little information about their strengths and weaknesses and the insights of experienced users about making best use of the data. See their list of featured datasets at: http://www.sgim.org/index.cfm?pageId=864