Initial start-up funding from a private family source has allowed the Consortium to support faculty recruitment, build out office space and laboratory facilities in the new Health and Biomedical Sciences Building and support some pre-doctoral graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. This funding has provided seed money for innovative projects of our faculty. Examples of each are given below:

Senior Faculty Recruitment-

The University of Houston welcomes Dr. Elena Grigorenko to join the Department of Psychology in September 2015. She will lead the newly constructed Human Genetics Lab.

She will be the first molecular geneticist to also study children and adolescent behavior in the Houston research community and has already started collaborations with UH and Baylor College of Medicine where she has a joint appointment.

Elena Grigorenko came from Yale where she was the Emily Fraser Beede Professor of Developmental Disabilities, Child Studies, Psychology, and Epidemiology and Public Health and Adjunct Senior Research Scientist at Moscow City University for Psychology and Education (Russia). She is a major figure in psychology with her doctoral and habilitation qualifications in general and educational psychology at Moscow State University, Russia and her Ph.D. in genetics and child development from Yale University. She has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and books.

Continuing Funded Collaborations

Pre-doctoral graduate students-

Support for Dr. Jennifer Tackett (UH), Dr. Paige Harden and Dr. Elliot Tucker-Drob (UT-Austin): This project allowed Dr. Tackett to hire a graduate student research assistant and provided operational funds to support Dr. Tackett’s collaboration with faculty at UT-Austin who were involved in behavior genetics. Dr. Tackett developed a twin registry in Houston that paralleled a registry in Austin, and collected pilot data involving temperament and personality as risk factors for behavior disorders in children. The funds were matched by UT-Austin.

Support for Dr. Carla Sharp (UH), Adolescent Treatment Program (ATP), Menninger Clinic/BCM: This project provided two graduate research assistants to receive training in research and intervention in the UH/Menninger Clinic Collaboration. This project assesses the outcomes of chronic mental health disorders for children treated at Menninger. Both funded students have submitted research training grants to NIH; one application is funded and the other application is pending.

Support for Dr. Doug Ris (TCH), Dr. Leandra Berry (BCM/TCH), Dr. Paul Massman (UH): A fellowship was created for a graduate student to conduct research in the TCH Autism program.

Post-doctoral fellows-

Support for Dr. Leigh Leasure (UH), Dr. M. Waleed Gaber (TCH), Dr. Doug Ris (BCM/TCH) to fund a postdoctoral fellow for two years to determine the effects of interventions for pediatric brain tumors on learning and behavior using animal models. This fund came in time to be a bridging support for an ongoing collaborative project to apply for a grant from the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT); the award from the institute was significantly delayed, yet the project was kept alive during the interim.

Support for Dr. Linda Ewing-Cobbs (UTH), Dr. Jenifer Juranek (UTH), Dr. Jennifer Tackett (UH) for a collaborative project examining post-traumatic changes in brain volume in regions associated with emotional processing and behavior regulation in regard to anxiety and emotional control. The partial support of a post-doctoral enabled the fellow to examine biomarkers of stress in salivary samples of children with either traumatic brain injury (TBI) or injuries to body regions other than the head in relation to mood, anxiety, and behavior regulation. This pilot study will be further explored once the NIH support is funded.

Support for Dr. Candice Alfano (UH), Dr. Dan Glazer (TCH) for a project to address the relation of sleep and anxiety in children. A postdoctoral fellow was recruited to the team during this study. Dr. Alfano has simultaneously received funds from other institutes, e.g. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and NIH.

Other operating support

Dr. Doug Ris (TCH), Dr. Marcia Barnes (UTH CLI), and UH’s Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics (TIMES). TIMES supported a senior methodologist, Dr. Karla Stuebing to act as a consultant for faculty at TCH and UTH CLI.

A large scale on-going project evaluates the development of reading comprehension in secondary students and involves Dr. Carolyn Denton and Dr. Marcia Barnes (UTH CLI), Dr. David Francis and Dr. Jack Fletcher (UH), and Dr. Sharon Vaughn (UT-Austin). Additional funding from TCHRC allowed Dr. Denton and Dr. Barnes to have a part-time research assistant who coordinated a series of short-term teaching experiments to determine the best ways to teach specific strategies to students struggling with reading comprehension in high school. UTH CLI provided matching funds for this effort.

Ongoing Projects

Texas Center for Learning Disabilities (TCLD), a NICHD federally funded multi-center project has a main focus on understanding structural and functional differences in the brain between children who respond adequately and those who respond inadequately to reading intervention. A component of the project is to use the neuroimaging technology to collect data correlating with reading intervention responses. The collaborators, Dr. Jenifer Juranek at the Brain Research Analysis in Neurodevelopment (BRAIN) Laboratory in the Children’s Learning Institute (UT Health) and another collaborator, Dr. Jessica Church-Fall at UT-Austin have benefited from the funding received from TCHRC. The future renewal of the TCLD funding (PI, Dr. Jack Fletcher, UH) will expand to include genetic factors with the added expertise of Dr. Grigorenko.

Collaboration between Dr. Paul Cirino (UH) and Dr. Katherine Ostermaier (TCH) will set up a new study in 2015-2016 of math intervention in children recruited from the Junior League Clinic who are diagnosed with spina bifida.

A new Pediatric Neuropsychology Scholar position will be created and hired as a faculty member at TCH, with a joint appointment at UH. This position will be responsible for coordinating research and training opportunities between the two institutions. In addition, this scholar will be paired with Dr. Grigorenko to initiate a NIH training grant with the goal of linking human genetic research with other ongoing collaborative research projects at both institutions.

A team of Dr. Bruno Breitmeyer (UH) and Dr. Doug Ris (TCH) is developing some unique assessments of attention and memory in an animal model involving chemotherapy and radiation treatment and if successful, the assessment tools can have clinical application for long-term survivors of childhood leukemia.

A novel study involving the team of Dr. Arturo Hernandez (UH), Dr. Elena Grigorenko (Yale/UH) and Dr. Jenifer Juranek (UTH) is addressing genetic factors that make learning the second language easer or harder. The study is an extension of a brain imaging study of bilingualism and subjects provided saliva samples for DNA extraction for this new approach. The initial finding showed clear heritability variation in second language learners. The data will be published in a major neurolinguistics journal and support from a NIH is approved to make this a longer term project.