LINCATS Pilot Program | Stony Brook Medicine

Mission: To serve as a catalyst for novel translational science investigations and the formation of new collaborative teams, particularly emphasizing under-presented groups and women.

Next Submission Period will be announced in 2024

We award pilot funding of up to $25K per investigator with projects of novel approaches to translational science, open to faculty and postdoctoral fellows from the LINCATS network. Up to 8 awards will be granted per year – 4 of which will be provided to principal investigators from collaborating institutions, and 4 for SBU investigators. (What is translational science?)

Topics for proposals should focus on the needs of underserved Long Island communities. Needs are identified through the Community Advisory Board and Community Ambassadors through their discussion with the communities they represent. At the 28 August 2023 All Hands Meeting in the Faith Baptist Church in Coram, NY, the CAB and Ambassadors opted to focus the Fall 2023 call's funding strategy towards the following needs:

Mental Health (Anxiety, Depression)
Substance Use Disorder
Violence (Human Trafficking, Gun Violence, Domestic Violence, Gender Violence)
Maternal Health Disparities (Mortality, Long-term Outcomes)

Eligibility and Submission Details

All postdoctoral fellows and faculty affiliated with the LINCATS network (Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, Northport VA Medical Center, Stony Brook University and all Stony Brook Medicine-affiliated healthcare locations) are eligible to apply. We will prioritize early career, under-represented groups, women, health disparities-focused clinical and translational science, and collaborative projects across institutions. Preference will be given to non-funded and new lines of research for the applying investigator.

Congratulations to our 2023 LINCATS Pilot Program Awardees!

Dr. Cassandra Heiselman

“Pregnancy Expectations Among Stigmatized Populations: Life experiences, Vulnerabilities, and Community” Roles

To improve care delivery and outcomes, it is critical to uncover the roles of psychosocial adversity on the perinatal experience. A growing body of literature links psychosocial vulnerabilities to poorer healthcare behaviors. One such vulnerability, the experience of discrimination, is associated with lower healthcare utilization and poorer health outcomes of minoritized and stigmatized populations. The goal of the study is to gain an in-depth understanding of how patients’ lived experiences shape their perceptions of obstetrics care. Findings will form the basis for the development of a unified theoretical framework regarding the effects of marginalization on maternal and infant health, intervention development, and future large-scale research that will include healthcare intervention.

Dr. Chander Sadasivan

“Clinical Translation of Personalized Medical Devices generated by Topology Optimization”

>Medical Device Production Systems (MDPS) are a new regulatory concept developed to approve the production of personalized, patient-matched medical devices (PMD) at point-of-care facilities. Topology Optimization (TO) is a powerful computational tool that can optimize the distribution of material to find the most efficient structure that fulfills the requirements defined by objective and constraint functions in the optimization scheme. Using TO, a set of disease-specific objective functions and constraints can be developed and applied to patient-specific variables (such as anatomy, stress or hemodynamics loads) in order to generate topology optimized, patient-matched medical devices (TO-PMD). These TO-PMDs can then be 3D-printed and implanted in that specific patient. Our long-term goal is to develop an MDPS whereby a point of care facility would input relevant data from a specific patient into TO software, the software would output a device structure optimized to treat that patient’s anatomy, a 3D-printer would manufacture the device, and the facility would post-process, sterilize, and proceed to implant the device in the patient. In this pilot project, we (co-Investigator Dr. Shikui Chen, Mechanical Engineering) will generate TO devices for several brain aneurysm anatomies and define a design envelope for these devices as the first step towards development of an MDPS for this disease.