Research Activities

Office of Research Support Energizes World-Class Research

by Camille Mojica Rey

"We have a vision . . . that includes setting the world standard for
nursing science and scholarship in the 21st century."

The School of Nursing's commitment to research excellence was reaffirmed when Geraldine Padilla assumed the role of Associate Dean for Research. In the early 1990s, the position was eliminated for budgetary reasons. Reinstated by Dean Kathleen Dracup, the position includes heading up the Office of Research. "We have a vision for the School of Nursing that includes setting the world standard for nursing science and scholarship in the 21st century," Padilla says. "Our goal is to facilitate the whole nursing research enterprise, from proposal to publication and policy development."

Padilla says nursing researchers can look forward to a list of new and expanded programs and services aimed at helping them secure funding, design experiments and measurement tools, analyze data and submit professionally edited manuscripts for peer review and publication. "We're a service-oriented office dedicated to addressing the needs of our investigators."

Padilla's own research deals with quality-of-life issues, focusing on culturally diverse populations of patients with cancer or arthritis. She has a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the reliability and validity of Spanish-language translations of quality-of-life questionnaires used to assess persons with breast and prostate cancer. To her new role, Padilla brings experience with national funding agencies as well as experience as a member of editorial boards.

Before Padilla's appointment, the office remained open while its small staff provided technical and statistical support to a growing number of the school's researchers. With additional staff and Padilla's help, many of the office's long-standing goals can now be accomplished, says Rob Slaughter, the office's administrative director. "With upgrades in technology, we will be able to increase the quantity and quality of research in the school," explains Slaughter, who has been with the office for 20 years. "We'll be better able to do things I've been wanting to do."

One of the major upgrades will take place this spring with the launch of the office website. Some of the office's current programs include working groups wherein investigators assist each other in the grant proposal development process. On the website, investigators will be able to find a growing list of templates for various portions of grant applications. Eventually, copies of successfully funded grants will be found on the site as well. In the future, the office hopes to hire a professional editor who will review manuscripts before they are submitted for publication.

Having a dean also allows the office to set and maintain policies on the timely use of the office's resources. For example, faculty will be alerted to upcoming deadlines for proposals and encouraged to seek the office's support early in the grant-writing process. "The hope is to get people into the pipeline sooner, be able to plan better and have the time to review grants in-house," Slaughter says. In the past, in-house review led to a dramatic increase in the rate of funding for projects, he adds.

Currently, the office provides programs and services to all of the school's researchers, including faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The staff provides necessary consultation that facilitates proposal preparation and review, statistical analysis, manuscript review and other kinds of technical assistance. It also serves as the liaison between the investigators and funding agencies, investigators and other research support services on campus, and investigators and collaborators here, around the country and abroad.

Many of the School's faculty members say they are glad to have Padilla on board and they look forward to the expansion of the office's programs. The new services will be of great value, says Marguerite Engler, professor and vice chair of physiological nursing, who is one of the researchers primed to benefit from the new support. "I'm looking forward to using the office quite a bit with future grants."

Engler has a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of nutritional interventions on children and adolescents with genetic hyperlipidemias. These young people have inherited a gene from their parents that results in abnormally high cholesterol levels and puts them at great risk for heart attacks. Currently, the study is in its second year and Engler is working with the Office of Research's Steve Paul on analyzing the first round of results.

Paul is also the statistician on Barbara Drew's grant studying a new way to better detect heart attacks using EKG. As the EKG celebrates its 100th birthday, Drew is looking at improving the accuracy with which the test reveals a heart attack. As it is used now, the test misses the early signs of a heart attack in 55 percent of the patients. "The current problem is that we don't detect attacks in people who have heart attacks on the back side of their hearts because we don't put electrodes on the person's back," explains Drew, who is also professor and vice chair in physiological nursing.

Patients whose diagnoses are delayed often do not get the benefit of early interventions that minimize damage to the heart, such as clot-buster drugs, stents or angioplasty. By simply moving the electrodes, Drew says emergency room physicians can get a three-dimensional, more accurate view of what's electrically going on in the heart. "We believe we can pick up heart attacks that occur in places that are usually missed by our current routine."

It is these kinds of cutting-edge research programs that Padilla says the Office of Research hopes to further enable. Current and future programs in the office will ensure that faculty, fellows and students can continue to conduct and disseminate top-notch research. "We are working toward providing for every need for our School of Nursing investigators so that they can concentrate on furthering nursing science and achieving research goals that signify turning points in health and health care."

Staff Rising to Challenges

While Geraldine Padilla leads the Office of Research into the 21st century, a growing staff works to support investigators with administrative, editorial and statistical tasks so that they can concentrate on their work.

Rob Slaughter has been with the office for 20 years. He serves as the administrative director and is responsible for implementing its new initiatives. Slaughter runs and maintains the computer lab, is head of information technology, heads the staff responsible for desktop computer support and conducts evaluations of the school's training grants and curriculum. He also works with researchers on developing and choosing instruments for their studies. "I tend to concentrate on psychometric elements, the measurement of human characteristics."

In that regard, Slaughter's work complements that of Steve Paul, the office's [principal] statistician [now joined by Bruce Cooper, senior statistician, who was recruited after this article was written]. "I work with anyone in the school interested in quantitative data analysis," says Paul. He consults with investigators on projects and proposals. Paul is written into several grants as the statistician.

Paul, who also teaches in the Biostatistics department on campus, has been with the office for 17 years. "There's so much more activity now," he says. In addition to an increase in the number of grants being funded, the kinds of studies being conducted by nursing faculty members, fellows and students have also changed. "Before, the research was about testing models and theories," Paul explains. "Now, there are more randomized clinical trials."

As the research of the School of Nursing continues to evolve and expand, so too does the Office of Research. In addition to Paul and Slaughter, Sharon Lee offers administrative support, and Ken Killion and Diane Heininger make up the technical support team.

With this kind of staff, Padilla says the school will no doubt be able to increase the quality and quantity of research. "Our hope is that the School's scientific achievements will have a significant impact."