Media contact: Hannah Echols
Marguerite “Ryan” Irvin, Ph.D.
(Photography: Steve Wood)Marguerite “Ryan” Irvin, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has received an Emerging Investigator Award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Irvin is the first investigator from the UAB School of Public Health and third at UAB to receive this award.
The award provides Irvin more than $6 million over a period of seven years to evaluate genetic risk scores that can help predict personal risk for cardiovascular and renal diseases, as well as African Americans’ treatment responses to common antihypertensive therapies. The study will test existing scores developed in other ethnic groups and create new and hopefully better-performing scores for comparison. The NHLBI R35 Program promotes scientific productivity and innovation by providing long-term support and increased flexibility to experienced principal investigators who are currently PIs on at least two NHLBI R01-equivalent awards and whose outstanding records of research demonstrate their ability to make major contributions to heart, lung, blood and sleep research. The R35 is intended to support a research program, rather than a research project, by providing the primary and most likely sole source of NHLBI funding on individual grant awards.
The award leverages both infrastructure and expertise in the UAB School of Public Health, including the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke study, the Jackson Heart Study, and the Antihypertensive and Lipid Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial. The project seeks to provide new information that will hopefully move genomic medicine forward, especially in African Americans, who are underrepresented in genomics research. The project will also strive to create new research opportunities for students, postdoctoral fellows and new investigators.