The Center for Women’s Reproductive Health (CWRH) and the Hypertension Research Center (HRC) are excited to announce the recipient of their collaborative University-Wide Interdisciplinary Centers pilot grant program. Dr. Rachel Sinkey, Assistant Professor of Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the Department of OB/GYN, and Dr. Eric Wallace, Associate Professor of Nephrology in the Department of Medicine, have been chosen to receive this award for the project “Validation of a Remote Monitoring Blood Pressure Cuff.”

The overall goal of the CWRH is to foster interdisciplinary collaborations across UAB campus to improve women’s reproductive health (RH) and survival. The mission is to conduct research aimed at improving the RH and wellbeing of all women and their offspring, especially minority and under-served (including those in rural Alabama). It is also to facilitate collaboration between UAB researchers and developing scholars interested in women's RH.

The Hypertension Research Center’s goal is to provide an environment and resources to support translational hypertension research from the early stages of basic science investigation through population research. Additionally, the Hypertension Research Center provides an infrastructure to enhance graduate and post-doctoral research and community outreach.

To accomplish their goals, the CWRH and HRC must maintain and continue to foster research funding opportunities while investing in their investigators and trainees and their affiliated divisions, departments, and schools. The Research Pilot fund was created to support research that generates preliminary data for future NIH or equivalent grant applications and that is relevant to hypertension and women’s RH. Both centers evaluated the highly competitive applications in detail. The members that participated in the evaluation have combined expertise in basic science, clinical research, and public health applying NIH criteria.

We would like to congratulate Drs. Sinkey, Wallace, and team on receiving this award!