Studies on attention allocation, improved sleep for hospitalized patients, cesarean delivery rates, and a gene mutation that places women at higher risk for cancers are just a few of the projects being conducted during the 2015-16 academic year by Boston College faculty supported with funding from the University’s Ignite Awards.
Designed to foster and fund research initiatives at BC, the grants awarded by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research help full-time tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty advance their research and compete for external funds or turn their research into a publication.
A look at some Ignite Award winners and their projects:
•Psychology Department Senior Lecturer Gene Heyman is developing a new way to quantify attention and studying how efficiently people allocate attention between competing stimuli.
“Attention plays an important role in mood and complex cognitive tasks [but it’s] difficult to study,” says Heyman, whose team published a paper, presented two talks at national scientific meetings and analyzed results from a study conducted last summer.
“Without the Ignite Award funds we would not be able to conduct these studies,” said Heyman, who hopes to use his published results and the results of current studies to write a grant proposal for further developing the approach to studying attention.
•Looking to improve the quality of health care during childbirth, Connell School of Nursing Assistant Professor Joyce Edmonds is examining the influence of nursing on cesarean delivery rates.
“Our long-term research goal is to understand the relationship between nursing and birth outcomes in order to improve the quality of health care for women and infants during childbirth,” says Edmonds.
Edmonds says the Ignite grant allowed her to “extract, aggregate, and analyze routinely collected birth and nursing data from the labor and delivery electronic health records,” resulting in a published article about her findings.
In addition to publishing new findings, Edmonds used her research to apply for a National Institute of Health external federal grant with collaborators from the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
•Professor of Sociology Sharlene Hesse-Biber, director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, is researching the BRCA mutation, a genetic predictor of heightened cancer risk.
“Testing positive for the BRCA mutation places women at a high risk for developing breast cancer, ovarian cancer and other hereditary cancers,” she says. Despite the profound ramifications of BRCA testing, Hesse-Biber says there is a lack of research into the impact of the test and its results on women.
Hesse-Biber recently published a Qualitative Health Research journal study about the experiences of women who tested positive for the BRCA mutation. With the Ignite grant, she hopes to develop and provide a model of understanding about how women make medical decisions.
“The funding I have received will be a tremendous means toward clinically meaningful work for me with regard to making an impact on the field of cancer predisposition and an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with healthcare professionals,” she says.
•Connell School Associate Professor Lichuan Ye used the Ignite grant to begin her research project “Sleep Promotion Toolkit for Hospitalized Patients (SLEEPkit),” which she describes as a “health information technology intervention.
“Improving sleep for hospitalized patients is an essential clinical need,” says Ye. “Inpatient sleep disturbance has been linked to clinically relevant and detrimental outcomes such as delirium and falls, both of which are known risk factors for morbidity, mortality, prolonged hospital stays and increased hospital costs.
“This project will lay the groundwork for making inpatient sleep promotion effective and feasible which will ultimately change current clinical practice related to patient sleep.”
The support of the Ignite grant led Ye to external funding and will allow her to continue to work on, and pilot, SLEEPkit.
See the full list of 2015-16 Ignite Award recipients and project descriptions here.
By Siobhan Sullivan | News and Public Affairs