Huge congratulations to faculty member, Dr. Katherine Ehrlich, on receiving a highly prestigious NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Grant! High-Risk High Reward Grant recipients are pursuing exceptionally high impact research studies aimed at addressing major gaps in biomedical research. Dr. Ehrlich’s lab studies how social experiences influence physical health across the lifespan. Her NIH grant will use children’s immune system responses to vaccination as a method to look at how variability in social experiences maps onto variability in measures of health that have clinical relevance (that is, antibody production following vaccination). Over the course of several projects, Dr. Ehrlich will look at a variety of social experiences, including stressors at home and at school, socioeconomic status, measures of emotion, and sources of resilience. In collaboration with Gene Brody at the Center for Family Research at UGA, Dr. Ehrlich will also examine how stressful life experiences across adolescence and adulthood shape adults’ responses to vaccination in an ongoing longitudinal study of African American families throughout rural Georgia. This work will be performed in collaboration with the Clinical and Translational Unit and Dr. Ted Ross at the Center for Vaccines and Immunology. Data collection has already begun for Dr. Ehrlich’s new study, with recruitment continuing throughout the upcoming winter. Keep up the outstanding work, Dr. Ehrlich!!
