CTSI Mentored Career Development Award goes to Jason Davies

Jason Davies, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the departments of Neurosurgery and Biomedical Informatics, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, will be researching better ways to predict who is most likely to have a stroke, and who is most likely to recover.

Since strokes have many causes and people are individually very different from one another, it’s difficult to know how much at risk any particular person might be. Davies’ project is designed to develop personalized risk predictions based on the combination of genetics and rich demographic, clinical and social data gleaned fromelectronic health records. All of these factors will be combined using artificial intelligence techniques to create new predictive models. If shown to be effective, these models could then be used to improve clinical practices and guide future health care policies based on constellations of risk factors that better represent individual patient risk.

Margarita L. Dubocovich, PhD, SUNY distinguished professor and senior associate dean for diversity and inclusion in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is the program lead of the CTSI Mentored Career Development Award Program. “Dr. Davies’ stellar training in neurological surgery and stroke -- combined with the expert guidance of outstanding mentors and the resources provided by the Clinical and Translational Science Institute -- will synergize his unique and novel research on personalized risk predictions for stroke,” she said.

Davies received his MD and PhD at Stanford University and was a resident in the University of California San Francisco Department of Neurological Surgery program. He joined University at Buffalo Neurosurgery as a fellow in 2015 and was named assistant professor in neurosurgery a year later.

The CTSI Mentored Career Development Award programs provide junior faculty with research and professional development mentoring under the guidance of experienced mentors to help their transition into independently funded clinical and translational investigators. CTSI scholars receive support to cover partial salary and research, tuition and travel costs for up to two years, as they submit for individual K or R awards.

Preference for funding awards is given to research that brings novel approaches towards reducing health disparities in clinical populations and applicants with experiences or attributes, which increase diversity in the clinical and translational workforce. Those goals align with the overall aims of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

More information about education and training in clinical and translational research can be found here.

The CTSI award is supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers UL1TR001412 to the University at Buffalo. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.