By Cristina D’Imperio
Joseph T. Church, MD (pictured top), and Hamza Yazdani, MD (pictured bottom), both McGowan affiliated faculty, have been awarded grants from the Competitive Medical Research Fund (CMRF).
The CMRF was established by the University of Pittsburgh in 1985 to “provide […] research support for projects across the broad range of biomedical sciences. These funds are used to support new investigators as they conduct the preliminary studies necessary to develop the hypotheses, preliminary data, and methods that support submission of highly competitive applications to extramural funding sources.”
In the last five years, the application success rate has averaged just over 35%, with researchers receiving standard funding of between $30,000 and $50,000.
Dr. Church is a pediatric surgeon and is board-certified in general surgery and in pediatric general and thoracic surgery by the American Board of Surgery. He is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
His laboratory research seeks to discover new prenatal therapies for congenital diaphragmatic hernia, and he is a member of the American Pediatric Surgical Association (APSA) and the American College of Surgeons (ACS).
Dr. Yazdani is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh. His research, clinical, and/or academic interests include liver transplant, liver ischemia-reperfusion, sterile inflammation; surgical stress in regulating tumor growth, metastasis, and the tumor microenvironment; the interaction between innate and adaptive immunity in the setting of surgical stress; exercise training in surgical stress and metastasis; and exercise in training innate and adaptive immunity.
Find the story at the University Times here.