GRFW: Collaborations and Renewal Awards

Through the Go Red SFRN, the five centers aimed to identify risks, signal markers and underlying conditions that may influence one another in previously unrealized ways. They accomplished this by communicating and collaborating to form a more synergistic picture of how different aspects of cardiovascular health in women can be related.

“The AHA very cleverly designed these networks to have, really, a snowball effect. The emphasis on collaboration between centers has resulted in us going and getting funding for directions that we probably wouldn’t have anticipated if left to our own devices — and that’s been a beautiful thing to see,” said Carl Hubel, Ph.D., Center Director at Magee Womens Research Institute. The research has “launched” fellows “who are now doing groundbreaking work,” he said.

“That’s been really exciting. To learn from other groups — for example experts in heart failure or biochemical pathways — it was really a nobrainer for us to collaborate with them,” added Hubel, whose team co-published with the Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Columbia fellow Faris Zuraikat, who spent time at University of California, San Diego — where research into sedentary lifestyle and nutrition coincided nicely with his studies into women’s sleep and behaviors — said he felt the collaboration was critical.

“We all have different expertise within the centers and certainly, across centers, collaboration allows us to develop relationships and learn from investigators who have similar interests but either a slightly or vastly different expertise than we do,” he said.

The OAC Chairperson, Kristin Newby, M.D., said the Go Red SFRN was “uniquely set up to foster cross-institutional collaboration within the network and the opportunity to share and apply tools to another Center’s project.

“Having the investigators working in a network and with an emphasis on collaboration really fostered the team science and strengthened all the individual projects.”

The Go Red for Women SFRN is one of 12 multi-center, multi-disciplinary research efforts created since the AHA established its first SFRN in 2014.

Other targeted topics include Prevention, Hypertension, Disparities, Heart Failure, Obesity, Children, Vascular Disease, Atrial Fibrillation, Arrhythmias & Sudden Cardiac Death, Cardiometabolic Health with a focus on Type 2 Diabetes, Health Technologies and Innovation and Disparities in Cardio-Oncology.