H1N1 flu outbreak response, public health preparedness projects receive grants
May 20, 2009
The North Carolina Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center has announced five awards for public health preparedness topics, including the response to the current H1N1 influenza outbreak.
The center, based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, has awarded the grants to four UNC faculty and one doctoral scholar from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The grants aim to engage new researchers from diverse disciplines in innovative studies of public health preparedness and response systems.
Edward L. Baker, MD, the center's principal investigator and director of the North Carolina Institute for Public Health said: "We are pleased to offer funding now, while we are in the midst of the response to the current H1N1 influenza outbreak, to support innovative approaches to tackling this critical problem. The new projects compliment and extend the methods and disciplines currently being used to conduct the center's research."
The recipients of the center's 2009 Mini-Grants of up to $20,000 are:
- Noel P. Greis, PhD, director of the Center for Logistics and Digital Strategy at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School, whose study is titled "A systems approach to North Carolina public health preparedness: Social networks and information models."
- Javed Mostafa, PhD, Frances Carroll McColl Term Associate Professor in the UNC School of Information and Library Science, whose study is titled "Public Health Informatics Pilot Study."
- Stephanie W. Haas, PhD, professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science, whose study is titled "Modeling communication links among public health emergency preparedness officials in North Carolina using social network analysis: A pilot study."
- James C. Thomas, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology and director of the program in public health ethics at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, whose study is titled "State pandemic influenza ethics preparedness."
Haas and Thomas' projects specifically address issues related to the H1N1 outbreak.
A New Investigator Award of $12,000 was granted to Eric Gebbie, a doctoral scholar from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. His study is titled "Initial review of applicability of international humanitarian emergency standards to displaced population care in the United States."
Grant funding comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which established the UNC-based center last year as one of seven such centers around the country.