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CHOICE faculty member, Aasthaa Bansal, awarded highly coveted NIH Merit Award

Aasthaa Bansal, Assistant Professor, CHOICE Institute
Aasthaa Bansal, Assistant Professor, CHOICE Institute

Assistant Professor Aasthaa Bansal at the CHOICE Institute was recently awarded a $2.5M+, seven-year Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) (R37) award from the National Cancer Institute to develop a dynamic decision-making framework for identifying personalized risk-adaptive surveillance strategies for cancer survivors. This research seeks to shift the paradigm of how routinely collected patient information is used for clinical management, by innovatively coupling data-adaptive prediction modeling with value of information analysis. The decision-making framework will evaluate the value of future clinical information and guide patient-level decisions about the timing of treatment and frequency of biomarker testing on an ongoing basis. It will be implemented on rich electronic health record data from Kaiser Permanente Southern California and could lead to major advances in personalized medical decision making.

NIH MERIT awards are awarded to early stage investigators whose R01 was scored below 6th percentile. It is designed to “provide long-term grant support to investigators whose research competence and productivity are distinctly superior and who are highly likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner.” In both 2016 and 2017 only eight proposals each year were converted to MERIT awards across all of NIH.

The interdisciplinary team includes CHOICE Institute faculty Dr. Aasthaa Bansal (PI), Dr. Anirban Basu and Dr. David Veenstra, as well as collaborators in the UW Departments of Biostatistics and Medicine, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

Link to CHOICE Institute archived news