UAB Heersink School of Medicine Awards Inaugural Team Science Grants to Tackle Complex Health Challenges
核心洞察
The Heersink School of Medicine (搜索) announced eight inaugural projects selected for its new Team Science Grant Program, each funded up to $150,000 per year for up to two years.
The program fosters interdisciplinary collaboration across Heersink and UAB, aligning with strategic research focus areas including D-TECH, HEAL, I-4ward, Brain Health and Disease Across the Lifespan, and Implementation Science.
Awarded projects span chronic kidney disease (搜索), substance use disorders (搜索), opioid addiction, infectious disease, epilepsy, mental health, arthritis, and neurodegenerative disease.
The Heersink School of Medicine (搜索) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has announced the eight inaugural projects selected for its new Team Science Grant Program, an initiative designed to bring together researchers with diverse expertise to tackle some of the most complex challenges in human health. Recommended by the Heersink REFRESH Committee and announced this past spring, the program reflects a growing emphasis on team science in research and seeks to encourage stronger collaboration between investigators across Heersink and UAB.
"Modern health challenges rarely fit within the boundaries of a single scientific discipline," said Tika Benveniste, Ph.D., senior vice dean at the UAB Heersink School of Medicine (搜索). "Advancing precision medicine, improving lifelong health, understanding brain and immunologic disorders, and developing new treatment approaches increasingly require experts from different fields to work together."
At Heersink, team science has become a core pillar of the school's research strategy. The Team Science Grant Program was created to foster interdisciplinary collaborations that can grow into large-scale, externally funded research initiatives, including multi-investigator National Institutes of Health grants, center grants, and other major funding opportunities. Awarded projects are funded up to $150,000 per year for up to two years and align with Heersink's strategic research focus areas—D-TECH, HEAL, I-4ward, Brain Health and Disease Across the Lifespan, and Implementation Science—along with the larger UAB Research Strategic Initiative.
The 2026 Team Science Program cohort includes projects focused on chronic kidney disease (搜索), substance use disorders (搜索), opioid addiction, infectious disease, epilepsy, mental health, arthritis, and neurodegenerative disease.
Chronic Kidney Disease and Pulmonary Complications
Led by Christian Faul, Ph.D., in the Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology, one project explores a potential link between kidney disease and lung health. Chronic kidney disease (搜索) affects more than 800 million people worldwide and is known to increase the risk of serious health complications beyond the kidneys. The team is investigating whether high phosphate levels in patients with chronic kidney disease may cause lung calcification, resulting in emphysema and compromised respiratory function.
Early findings from the team's collaborative work suggest that these lung changes may be far more common than previously recognized and could represent a new pathway linking kidney disease to pulmonary complications. The project brings together Faul, Orlando Gutierrez, M.D., Stefanie Krick, M.D., Ph.D., and Surya Bhatt, M.D., to combine laboratory studies, preclinical models, and large-scale patient data analysis. The team will explore novel therapeutic strategies to prevent or reverse lung calcification while analyzing thousands of CT scans to determine how kidney disease and elevated phosphate levels affect lung structure and function in patients.
Incretin-Based Therapies for Substance Use Disorders
Andrew Hardaway, Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology, leads a team exploring whether a class of drugs originally developed to treat diabetes and obesity—including GLP-1 (搜索) and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) based therapies—could also help reduce drug-seeking behaviors and support recovery from substance use disorders (搜索). Substance use disorders remain a major public health challenge, yet there are limited effective medications available for many forms of addiction.
The researchers will investigate how these medications act on specific brain circuits involved in reward, motivation, and addiction, with a particular focus on cocaine use disorder. Their work has the potential to open a new therapeutic avenue for a condition that affects millions of Americans. The project brings together Hardaway, Aurelio Galli, Ph.D., and Kirk Habegger, Ph.D., to investigate how GIP receptor (搜索) signaling influences brain activity and drug reward.
Glycan and Neuroimmune Axis in Opioid Addiction
Jasper Heinsbroek, Ph.D., Department of Neurobiology, leads an interdisciplinary team investigating how changes in the brain's extracellular matrix, immune signaling, and glycan biology contribute to addiction, craving, and relapse. The opioid epidemic continues to have devastating consequences for individuals, families, and communities, emphasizing the urgent need for new approaches to understanding and treating opioid use disorder (搜索).
By focusing on the ventral pallidum, a key region in the brain's reward system, the researchers seek to uncover previously unexplored biological mechanisms underlying persistent opioid-seeking behaviors and to identify new therapeutic targets for intervention. Heinsbroek is joined by Juhi Samal, Ph.D., Jeremy Day, Ph.D., and Daniel Tyrrell, Ph.D., to generate sophisticated spatial maps of molecular and cellular changes occurring in the brain during opioid use, withdrawal, and relapse.
Precision Medicine for Nontuberculous Mycobacterial Infections
Sixto Leal, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Pathology, leads a multidisciplinary team focused on nontuberculous mycobacterial pulmonary disease (搜索) (NTM-PD), a growing public health concern particularly in the southeastern United States, where disease burden is among the highest in the nation. Patients experience remarkably different disease trajectories, with some remaining relatively stable while others develop progressive, treatment-resistant lung disease.
The team seeks to uncover the biological factors that drive those differences by examining the complex relationships among host immune responses, microbial evolution, and pulmonary disease progression. Their ultimate goal is to develop precision medicine approaches that can better predict outcomes and guide treatment decisions for patients with NTM-PD. The project integrates patient-derived clinical data, microbial genomics, immune profiling, preclinical models, and machine learning.
Epigenetic and Circadian Mechanisms in Epilepsy
Farah Lubin, Ph.D., Department of Neurobiology, leads research investigating how the brain's internal biological clock influences seizure susceptibility and cognitive function. Temporal lobe epilepsy (搜索) is one of the most common and treatment-resistant neurological disorders, affecting millions of people and often causing both recurrent seizures and significant memory impairment.
Focusing on the dentate gyrus, a critical region of the hippocampus that helps regulate neural activity and memory formation, the researchers aim to uncover how disruptions in circadian rhythms and epigenetic regulation contribute to epilepsy and its associated cognitive deficits. Using advanced single-cell genomic technologies, continuous seizure monitoring, behavioral testing, and analyses of both preclinical models and human tissue, the team will identify molecular pathways that regulate seizure risk across the day-night cycle.
Neuromodulation of Sleep and Mood
Matthew Macaluso, D.O., leads a team investigating why some individuals respond to non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS), an emerging form of neuromodulation that has shown promise in improving mood, sleep, and autonomic nervous system function. Depression (搜索) and insomnia are among the most common and debilitating health conditions worldwide, and they frequently occur together.
The researchers aim to develop a first-of-its-kind biomarker framework that combines physiologic, behavioral, and molecular data to understand better how nVNS works and to identify which patients are most likely to benefit from treatment. By integrating wearable health technology, sleep assessments, heart rate variability monitoring, clinical symptom measures, and molecular analyses of circulating microRNAs, the team will examine the complex relationships among sleep, autonomic regulation, and depression (搜索).
Crystalline Arthritis Research Platform
Tony Merriman, Ph.D., and Kenneth Saag, M.D., co-lead the Crystalline Arthritis Research Platform (CARP) Initiative, which seeks to build a comprehensive research platform to uncover the clinical and molecular drivers of disease progression, treatment response, and long-term outcomes in crystalline arthritis. Gout (搜索) and calcium pyrophosphate deposition (CPPD) disease are the most common forms of inflammatory arthritis, affecting millions of people and contributing to significant pain, disability, and healthcare burden.
The project will establish new infrastructure and generate critical preliminary data to support renewal of an NIH Center of Research Translation grant focused on these conditions. Through three interconnected research cores, the team will create repositories of patient biospecimens for advanced single-cell and multi-omics studies, develop a deeply characterized longitudinal patient cohort linked to regional and national healthcare data, and implement wearable technologies to track disease flares and patient outcomes in real-world settings.
MRI-Derived Surrogate of Glymphatic Clearance
Virendra Mishra, Ph.D., Department of Radiology, leads a team aiming to develop and validate a novel MRI-based Glymphatic Function Index (GFI) that can serve as a biologically meaningful measure of brain fluid transport and waste clearance. The brain has a remarkable system for transporting fluid and clearing proteins and other waste products that accumulate with aging, a process known as the glymphatic system. Yet researchers currently lack a reliable, non-invasive way to measure these processes in living humans.
Rather than relying on a single MRI measurement, the GFI will integrate complementary measures of cerebrospinal fluid dynamics, vascular pulsatility, perivascular spaces, and tissue fluid mobility. The study will examine how changes in sleep, including a night of sleep deprivation, affect these MRI measures and whether those changes correspond with independent blood-based markers of protein clearance, including amyloid-beta (搜索) and phosphorylated tau (搜索). If successful, this work will establish a reproducible, non-invasive MRI approach for studying brain fluid transport and provide preliminary evidence for the biological relevance of the GFI.
Strengthening Research Through Collaboration
The 2026 Team Science Grant awardees provide a snapshot of the breadth and depth of Heersink researchers' expertise and highlight the importance of collaboration in addressing the health challenges faced by millions. Partnerships like these strengthen UAB's research enterprise and accelerate innovative discoveries that will improve health outcomes not only in Alabama but across the world.