Innovative clinical researchers receive awards
Sarah L. Cutrona, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine, and Heena P. Santry, MD, assistant professor of surgery, have received 2010 Clinical Research Scholar Awards, through a pilot program of the UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science. Launched in 2008, the program combines coursework, seminars and mentored research, and provides three to five years of financial support and training for investigators committed to careers in innovative, hypothesis-driven clinical and translational research.
Dr. Cutrona will investigate a “friend-to-friend” electronic message system to encourage colorectal cancer screening. Her work “will leverage recent advances in technology to make substantive contributions to the fields of preventive health care research and dissemination science,” according to her sponsor and primary mentor, Jerry Gurwitz, MD, executive director of the Meyers Primary Care Institute, the John Meyers Professor of Primary Care Medicine and professor of medicine and family medicine & community health. “Dr. Cutrona is an exceptionally promising and rigorously trained young investigator who will become a highly successful independent investigator,” said Dr. Gurwitz.
Cutrona received her medical degree from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and a master of public health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed her internship and residency training in internal medicine at Brown University/Rhode Island Hospital before joining the UMMS faculty in 2009.
Dr. Santry will investigate the development of a risk adjustment score that considers psychosocial and geographic factors impacting non-trauma emergency surgery outcomes. She will also describe current trends in the implementation of acute care surgery teams and determine if an “acute care surgery model” can affect quality, accessibility and cost. Her development of a risk adjustment score will permit comparative research on non-trauma emergency surgery patients and the establishment of National Emergency Surgery Registry.
Santry’s primary mentor, Catarina Kiefe, PhD, MD, chair and professor of quantitative health sciences and professor of medicine, predicts Santry’s “ambitious plans to develop a novel risk score and national registry for non-traumatic surgical emergencies will add to existing expertise and position UMMS as a leader in surgical health services research.”
Santry received her medical degree from UMMS and a master of science in health studies from the University of Chicago as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Santry returned to UMMS in 2010 as a faculty member in the Department of Surgery.
UMMS was awarded a five-year, $20 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2010 to accelerate the process of turning laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, engage communities in clinical research and enhance the training of a new generation of researchers. Led by the National Center for Research Resources of the NIH, the CTSA program is a national consortium of 55 elite medical research institutions working together to improve the way biomedical research is conducted across the country.
