Program Director for Translational Innovation Program Awarded Major NIH Grant

The NIH awarded The Department of Economics  at The Ohio State University $2.3 million, five year study  about the health and economic impacts of COVID-19. Bruce Weinberg , who is the Program Director for Translational Innovation Program  at the CCTS, is the main PI for this grant.

Weinberg runs an optional module on Innovation with Tanya Mathew and Caroline Crisafulli.

"We are focused on understanding barriers to innovation, commercialization, and entrepreneurship of biomedical advances, especially among women and underrepresented groups," says Weinberg. "This U01 is (obviously!) pretty different from the work we have done for the CCTS, but we started working on COVID-19 quite soon after the pandemic hit and NCATS and the CCTS helped us get started – NCATS gave us a supplement that supported our work for the first year, which made it possible for us to be in a credible position to apply for and, now receive, this award." 

The main idea of this project is to observe and estimate the health and economic impacts of COVID-19 and responses to it. From this, the hope is to benefit policymakers with information regarding best-practices and costs of policy responses, including lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccinations, to support informed, civil discourse and policy making (NIH, 2021) .

"Maybe the best thing to do is to add that we simply would not have been competitive for this application without support of NCATS and the CCTS as well as the Office of Research, the Institute for Population Research, and NIA and the NBER," says Weinberg. "All of that support positioned the entire team to have the data, expertise, and preliminary results to make the proposal viable. We are now really excited to be able to build out the work and hope to be able to apply our models to study the opioid epidemic, which we believe has similarities in terms of modeling. "

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