Full Transcend Awardees
Geospatial Research Initiative
Leadership: Nathan Jacobs, Alexander Bradley, Michael Frachetti, Jennifer Moore
The Geospatial Research Initiative (GRI) will function as a resource to build excellence in geospatial research across all schools at Washington University. GRI aims to make WashU a preeminent international leader in geospatial research by 2030. Geospatial science collects, analyzes, and visualizes data about location. Geospatial science applies to every field of human inquiry: it can help understand how ice sheets respond to a changing climate, visualize how species migrate across ecosystems, and model how a virus moves through human populations. Geospatial science can be used to investigate the relationship of wealth and poverty to political borders or environmental pollution. It can map how ancient trade routes were shaped by natural resources or how society, culture, language, and religion contribute to modern conflicts. If a problem involves factors that vary across space and time, geospatial science can contribute to a deeper understanding.
The availability of big data, development of new information technologies, and rapid advances in cutting-edge sensing technologies has transformed geospatial science into a dynamic and rapidly growing field. But geospatial science is not a stand-alone discipline: it is a set of tools, approaches, and visualizations that can help solve problems across academic fields. The WashU research community needs to be able to leverage these tools in a way that is available to non-specialists, so that a “long tail” of disciplinary inquiries can benefit from geospatial expertise and integrate these powerful approaches into their research. GRI will establish an intellectual center focused on applying geospatial tools to questions big and small, magnifying the research profile of the university and launching the global recognition of WashU geospatial expertise and partnerships.
Improving Mental Health, Poverty and AIDS Research and Training in Global Contexts (IMPACT Global) Center
Leadership: Fred Ssewamala, Mary McKay, Patricia Cavazos-Rehg
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to 71% of people living with HIV worldwide. The HIV epidemic continues to spread among young people, with adolescents being reported as the only age group where HIV prevalence is rising. Many SSA countries also report poor child and adolescent mental health (CAMH) services and a dearth of CAMH researchers and practitioners. HIV/AIDS and co-occurring mental health problems are further exacerbated by pervasive poverty in SSA. Studies and theory suggest causal pathways between family economic resources, mental health, and HIV risk. Single interventions are insufficient to address the complex and multi-dimensional mental health and HIV-related risks among youth. Hence, combination interventions are critical to providing the transdisciplinary, multi-level response needed to improve HIV and mental health outcomes. Against this backdrop, co-led by Drs. Ssewamala (Brown School), McKay (Provost Office or Brown School?), and Cavazos-Rehg (School of Medicine), the new transdisciplinary center, named “Improving Mental Health, Poverty, and AIDS ResearCh and Training in Global ContexTs” (IMPACT) Global Center” (2024-2027) that launched in July serves as a resource connecting a transdisciplinary network of investigators along with global partners, specifically from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to test and determine the most cost-effective, innovative promising and scalable interventions as well as advance scientific methods to effectively address issues at the intersection of HIV, mental health and poverty with the overall goal of ultimately reducing new infections and end the HIV epidemic.
IMPACT Global Center will bring together faculty experts that represent Brown School (Ozge Sensoy Bahar, Byron Powell, Shenyang Guo, Patrick Fowler, Jenine Harris, Proscovia Nabunya, Nhial Tutlam, Samuel Kizito), School of Medicine (Elvin Geng, Juliet Iwelunmor), School of Engineering (Chenyang Lu), Arts and Sciences (Cindy Brantmeier), and Sam Fox School (Penina Acayo Laker) to co-lead its Administrative, Advanced Methods and Development Cores and their units.
Air Quality & Health
Leadership: Randall Martin, Ziyad Al-Aly, Jay Turner, Victor Davila-Roman, Yin Cao
Air quality is a leading environmental determinant of health that is associated with morbidity, mortality, and quality of life. Prominent questions remain about air pollution impacts on human health and its management. The new Transcend Initiative in Air Quality and Health will facilitate collaborative research, broaden activities, and coalesce WashU experts into an internationally-recognized cluster of excellence that is successful in jointly attracting extramural funds and positions WashU to be a leader in this area. To establish such a diverse collaborative hub with local community impact, global reach, and world-class academic distinction, tthis initiative brings together leading experts in multiple domains, including exposure assessment (indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring; microbiome), built environment, health disparities, health policy, global health, experimental and predictive models, as well as clinical and epidemiologic expertise covering many major chronic diseases.
The initiative is led by a diverse team of core faculty across two current schools: Engineering (Martin and Turner) and Medicine (Al-Aly, Cao, and Davila-Roman), and will closely align with the forthcoming School of Public Health. The initiative supports 1) a dynamic cohort of co-advised trainees to facilitate research and collaboration across schools, 2) workshops and symposia to position WashU to be a leader in air quality and health, 3) seminars and meetings to support and strengthen faculty and student collaboration, and 4) administrative expertise to build capacity and facilitate extramural proposals in air quality and health.
Center for Education Research, Practice, and Policy Partnerships (CERP³)
Leadership: Jason Jabbari, Kelly Harris, Allison King, Andrew Butler, Victoria May, Rachel Ruggirello, Michael Wysession, Young-Shin Jun, Casey Reimer
The Washington University Center for Education Research, Practice, and Policy Partnerships (CERP³) is a university-wide education research initiative that will serve as a hub and catalyst for research-to-practice-to-policy partnership initiatives in education. Through transdisciplinary science, community-based research, and data-driven evidence, CERP³ will improve our ability to comprehensively understand systemic barriers to opportunities across multiple contexts, as well as our ability to design, implement, and test policies, programs, and practices that both seek to remove these barriers and create new opportunities in and through education. Ultimately, CERP³ will reduce social inequities in the St. Louis region, allowing it to reach its full potential, while also translating solutions into broader social policies that can affect change across the country.
CERP³ will be led collaboratively by researchers from the Brown School (Jason Jabbari), Arts & Sciences (Andrew Butler and Michael Wysession), WUSM (Kelly Harris, Allison King, and Casey Reimer), The Institute for School Partnership (Vicky May and Rachel Ruggirello), and the McKelvey School of Engineering (Yung-Shin Jun). CERP³ will be housed in the Brown School.
Center for Holistic Integrated Research in Psychedelics (CHIRP)
Leadership: Ginger Nicol, Leopoldo Cabassa
One of the first clinical studies of psychedelic assisted therapy (PAT) was conducted at WashU in the early 1950’s. Almost 75 years later, we still have much to learn about the potential of psychedelic medicines like psilocybin (‘magic mushrooms’) and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) for healing human diseases. Scientists and scholars at WashU, with the help of partners in our extended community (patients, research participants and their loved ones; health care providers, business and industry leaders) are uniquely poised to answer how PAT works (basic science) to how well it works (precision & hybrid clinical trials), for whom (health equity & healthcare policy), and in what context (implementation & social sciences).
Co-directed by Dr. Ginger Nicol, MD, a clinical trialist and transgenerational psychiatrist, and Dr. Leopoldo J. Cabassa, an implementation scientist, health equity scholar, and expert in mental health services research, core CHIRP functions will be three-fold: a) launching a cutting-edge research program using novel brain imaging developed by WashU neuroscientists in a pharmaco-imaging study of psilocybin in healthy older adults, as well as other critical pilot studies, b) showcasing work by a diversity of researchers, methods and disciplines in psychedelics research in virtual seminars, as well as inaugurating an annual scientific conference, and c) spearheading a formal training curriculum, including clinical practicum experience, to train the next generation of psychedelic clinicians and researchers in collaboration with Columbia University.
2023-24 Partial Transcend Awardees
Teams that show great promise have been awarded partial Transcend Initiative Grants to further develop their initiatives. Teams can reapply to be a full Transcend Initiative at a later date.
- University-Wide Research on Vector-Borne Diseases, Public Health, Research Impacting the St. Louis Community; Leadership: Solny Adalsteinsson, Jacco Boon, Michael Landis, Susan Flowers
- Children and Youth Collaborative Network, Public Health; Leadership: Melissa Jonson-Reid, Brown School; Anneliese Schaefer, WUSM; Kimberly Johnson, Brown School
- EnviroTex: Advancing Interdisciplinary Environmental Solutions in Textiles Design to Adoption, Environmental Research; Leadership: Marcus Foston, Arpita Bose, Dino Christenson, Mary Ruppert-Stroescu
- WashU Synthetic Biology Initiative of Plants and Microbes, Environmental Research; Leadership: Joseph Jez, Fuzhong Zhang, Himadri Pakrasi