Ruth O’Hara, PhD, Senior Associate Dean for Research in the School of Medicine, has been named principal investigator for the five-year, $53 million grant renewal for the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program. The CTSA Program is overseen by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health.

In the new role, O’Hara will oversee efforts to strengthen Stanford Medicine’s clinical and translational research with initiatives to:

• Educate the next generation of researchers with the skills required to conduct innovative clinical and translational research in health-care delivery and wellness. Funding also supports team science through training and pilot projects that foster collaborations with professionals trained in fields outside of medicine.

• Enhance community engagement to ensure that the outcomes of the research benefit all segments of the population, including people with rare diseases, minorities and women, and vulnerable populations, such as children and elderly people. A new recruitment program will expand the school’s efforts to engage potential research participants in all of these populations.

• Strengthen resources and services necessary to efficiently translate discoveries into ways to improve the health of individuals and populations.

• Develop data-science methods, services and assessment tools to help researchers find ways of improving health outcomes, while at the same time reducing costs, promoting regulatory compliance and ensuring data accessibility.

• Share Stanford best-in-class resources in artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and precision health with the 50-plus CTSA Program member institutions around the nation.

O’Hara comes to this position after decades conducting clinical research in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Her main research focus is on the mechanisms by which medical disorders, (e.g. breast cancer, sleep disorders), impact brain circuitry and function, leading to significant neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms. One line of her research focuses on the best methodological approaches to understanding these complex interactions, including the impact of medical disorders on clinical trial outcomes.  She has had numerous NIH and foundation grants to support her work.

A long proponent for career development education and mentorship in clinical research, O’Hara has also served as national director of the 28-site, VA Advanced Fellowship Program in Mental Health Research and Treatment, which has graduated over 300 MD and PhD scholars, with more than 70 percent entering independent clinical research careers in academic medicine. This program is the largest of its kind, with sites at Stanford, Yale, Duke, Mount Sinai, UC San Francisco, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, Baylor, University of Pittsburgh and University of Pennsylvania, among others.