Elin Grundberg, PhD
Roberta D. Harding & William F. Bradley Jr. Endowed Chair in Genomic Research; Associate Professor of Pediatrics, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine; Research Associate Professor of Pathology, University of Kansas School of Medicine
Full BiographyElin Grundberg, PhD, of the Genomic Medicine Center, was recently awarded one-year, $450,000 supplements (3R01MD015409) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of the Director.
The parent award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, part of the NIH, to Dr. Grundberg focuses on asthma, a common, chronic disease of childhood that disproportionately impacts African American children. The project studies the potential links of chronic stress to biological (epigenomic) changes in immunity impacting asthma risk and morbidity in African American children.
Dr. Grundberg’s first supplement to the parent award, “Contextualizing and Addressing Population-Level Bias in Social Epigenomics Study of Asthma in Childhood,” will support the effective community representation of large-scale data models and provide an approach to include additional data addressing sociodemographic differences between participants.
The second supplement, “Ethical Implementation of Social Epigenomics Research on Asthma in a Health Disparity Population,” will explore perceptions of social epigenomics research and strategies to minimize risk. This initiative involves qualitative interviews and focus groups with African American participants.
“We are grateful for the additional support from the NIH allowing us to extend our program to not only more efficiently analyze relationships between epigenomic and sociodemographic data but also to address ethical challenges in social epigenomic research,” says Dr. Grundberg.
Lead co-investigators for the supplements are Keith Feldman, PhD, and Courtney Berrios.