In the Genomics for Cardiovascular Disease section 7 new staff were hired, administrative assistant, research fellows, two post-doctoral fellow, post-bachelorette, nurse, physician assistant and an additional two will start in November 2014. Dr. Gibbons lab has successfully presented our research at many national and international conferences and has published over 12 manuscripts in peer review journals. Over 15 manuscripts are currently being developed. Within FY13-14 Dr. Gibbons has successfully established a new protocol to recruit over 1800 African-Americans for clinical evaluation and research testing called GENE-FORECASTSM (GENomics, Environmental FactORs and the Social DEterminants of Cardiovascular Disease in African-Americans STudy). Recruitment efforts include the District of Columbia, Montgomery and Prince Georges County. Our goal is to recruit 1800 volunteers for evaluation in the NIH Clinical Center over the next 3 to 5 years. We have exceeded our recruitment goals this year with 373 volunteers recruited and many more events still being added to our recruitment calendar. Our recruitment began in January 2014 and our Outreach and Recruitment Coordinators strategy involves attending and presenting at community health fairs and events (264) that have spanned across the Washington Metropolitan area, in conjunction with a cohort of volunteers recruited during our telephone surveys, (109) conducted by a third party. We are currently exploring marketing and advertisement vendors to develop a campaign to increase recruitment and visibility of the GENE-FORECAST research study. Additionally, Dr. Gibbons has successfully established a send protocol the Minority Health Genomics and Translational Research BIorepository Database (MH-GRID) project infrastructure facilitated the collection of biospecimens and related multidimensional data elements within a consortium of minority-serving clinics. MH-GRID Project was designed as a case-control study to assess both the genetic and social-behavioral determinants of severe hypertension in AA. Accordingly, the MH-GRID data set includes social-behavioral variables, clinical phenotype characterization and whole exome sequence data on cases with severe hypertension as well as normotensive controls. Dr. Gibbons has successfully establish a robust computer infrastructure and sequencing pipelines to support the analyses through actively computing, imputing, and simulating genomic and phenotypic models developed by dimensionality reduction techniques to gain useful insights from large genomic data sets. Within FY13-14, Dr. Gibbons has also established a cryo-repository facility with 100% tracing of biological samples utilizing Lab-Matrix (laboratory information management system), and setup two functional wet-bench labs. A total of six publications were generated for 2014 and 2015 by the Social Epidemiology Research Unit.
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