A Note from the Associate Chair for Research

Greetings from the Office of Research & Scholarship (ORS) It has been exciting to look back in the rear-view mirror and see how robustly we have emerged from the pandemic shut-down/slow-down in terms of our research endeavors. In fact, our grant funding has increased steadily over the past four years, reaching $6 5 million for 2022 In that year, our researchers submitted over 53 grant applications and, across the department, were awarded 37 during the same time-frame. As you will see within this report, those awards came from a variety of sources and, although the largest funding amounts came from federal sources, the portfolio also includes a healthy range of private foundations

With the pandemic behind us, the ORS – with strong input from the Research Advisory Committee – has turned its attention to establishing strategic aims to reinvigorate and guide our research endeavors moving forward Identifying our strengths and commonalities among the heterogeneity of research interests in DHS, upon which to build focused initiatives, has itself been an exercise in discovery One of the most encompassing strengths of our research endeavor is its rich collaborative nature These collaborative networks can be gleaned from analyzing the publications coming out of DHS over the past couple of years. Such an analysis yielded the infographic shown in the upper panel of Figure 2 which depicts the network of intramural units that our researchers collaborate with; the lower panel shows the analogous web of connections with extramural institutions.

Of course, research and scholarship mean so much more than grant dollars and publication numbers; they represent the combined efforts of dedicated individuals – investigators, support staff, and students –who seek to find new and better ways to advance the health of our communities and the world beyond With the collaborative drive and collegial spirit so evident in our department, the future of research and scholarship in the DHS looks bright