The research of eleven faculty, staff and student collaborators at the Institute for Child Health Policy (ICHP) will be presented at the 2019 Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) Meeting in April.
“The list of researchers from ICHP is impressive,” said Matthew Gurka, Ph.D., associate director of ICHP. “It illustrates the transdisciplinary nature of the research we conduct at ICHP and the broad range of collaborations supported by the institute.”
The international PAS meeting, held in Baltimore, Maryland from April 24 to May 1, attracts some 8,000 child health researchers from around the world in the basic and clinical sciences, including pediatricians, academic child health researchers, clinician-educators, public health professionals and clinical care providers.
Three oral presentations and seven poster presentations at the 2019 PAS meeting will feature the collaborative work of ICHP researchers. Topics range from flu vaccine hesitancy in university students to a text message-based intervention developed to improve health outcomes in overweight adolescents.
Among the presenters from ICHP:
- Gurka will give an oral presentation titled “ADHD and Obesity: BMI Trajectories Impacted by Medication Type, Sex and Age of Medication Initiation.” ICHP collaborators include Director Betsy Shenkman, Ph.D., and Assistant Director of Clinical Research Lindsay Thompson, M.D., M.S., along with researchers from the department of pediatrics. Gurka also collaborated on studies for four poster abstracts that will be presented at the PAS meeting by other child health researchers from ICHP and UF Health.
- Thompson will give two poster presentations in the medical education category: 1) “A Qualitative Evaluation of the American Board of Pediatrics’ Performance Improvement Modules,” and 2) “Diplomates of the American Board of Pediatrics’ Use of Maintenance of Certification Part 4 Performance Improvement Modules.” Thompson is a co-author on five additional abstracts being presented at PAS this year.
- Stephanie Staras, PhD., a faculty member in ICHP, will give a poster presentation titled “Identifying Geographic HPV-related Cancer Disparities to Target HPV Vaccine Interventions.” Staras’ research on the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine is funded by the National Cancer Institute.
Other ICHP researchers who collaborated on studies presented at PAS include biostatistician Stephanie Filipp, M.P.H., Assistant Professor Yi Guo, Ph.D., Assistant Research Scientist Jaclyn Hall, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Ramzi Salloum, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Ryan Theis, Ph.D., and graduate students Tianyao Huo and Alexandra Lee.
The PAS Meeting is led by four pediatric organizations – the American Pediatric Society, the Society for Pediatric Research, the American Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics – in partnership with three alliance societies and more than 20 affiliate pediatric societies, with the goal of advancing pediatric research, medical education, clinical care and child advocacy.