Department of Internal Medicine Research

Dear colleagues and friends in the Department of Internal Medicine,

Firstly, we would like to wish you all the best in this new year. We hope that it will be full of health and success. In the office of vice chairs for Research in the Department of Internal Medicine, we are very proud of all the accomplishments of our faculty. We would like to recognize some of the successes in our department.

On May 19, 2022, we hosted the Department of Internal Medicine Annual Scientific Symposium. We had the honor of hosting Victor Dzau, MD, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Duke University and president of the National Academy of Medicine, as our keynote speaker. More than 120 research abstracts were presented and judged by 40 of our faculty. This demonstrates the vitality of the research at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Congratulations to the 14 presenters who won best poster in their category. A special thank you to our four rising stars who gave oral presentations — Lapo Alinari, MD, PhD, Sethu Madhavan, MBBS, Anasuya Sarkar, PhD, and Juliet Varghese, PhD. Please save the date for our 2023 symposium on Thursday, May 11.

In 2022, 15 faculty from eight divisions received Pilot Awards to support junior faculty or those requiring bridge support. Awardees from previous years are reporting several publications, grant awards and submissions that were possible thanks to this institutional support.

We provided statistical support to more than 40 research projects to members of 10 different divisions. As a complement, we have had a very successful first teaching session for all the members of our department through a course on introductory biostatistics. We are working on setting the date for a second session for the first week in February.

We also partnered with the OSUCCC – James for the R Club, where our department sponsors our junior faculty participation. In total, nine faculty have taken advantage of this program. To accompany this program, we support free access for our faculty to the video library of Meg Bouvier, PhD, who advises on grant writing.

We had the first of two meetings oriented toward recognizing the contributions of the nonclinical faculty in our department. We aim for this to be a mechanism by which integration and collaboration between the research community in our department will be promoted.

2022 was a highly successful year in securing grant support for our research, with over a 9% increase in research funding, from $110 million to more than $121.6 million in grant dollars.

We thank several faculty who shared with us some essential suggestions for promoting increased interaction and collaboration between the members of our department. Finally, we want to express our enormous gratitude to Rama Mallampalli, MD, and all the members of the chair’s office who have made this possible. Without the department’s economic and administrative support, these programs would not have been possible.

We wish you and your families the best in 2023!