Research
May 15, 2025
Dr. Taylor Hendrixson, UW Pediatrics Assistant Professor, receives 2025 CFAR New Investigator Award
Categories: Awards, Children, Research
Congratulations to Dr. Taylor Hendrixson, Assistant Professor in UW Pediatrics, for receiving a 2025 UW/Fred Hutch Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) New Investigator Award! The two-year award focuses on supporting early career investigators to conduct independent HIV research and apply for future funding to continue their HIV/AIDS research careers.
Dr. Hendrixson is a neonatologist, pediatric infectious disease physician and faculty within the UW Department of Pediatrics. His research has focused on improving maternal and early infant nutrition to optimize growth and improve long-term outcomes in low- and middle-income settings. He works on clinical and clinical-translational trials targeting populations at high-risk for nutritional deficiencies and growth faltering. He is the PI of a K23 award investigating multi-omic interactions of the maternal-breastmilk-infant triad and associations with clinical outcomes among women living with HIV and their infants HIV-exposed uninfected in Kenya.
With support from the new award, Dr. Hendrixson will investigate anemia and iron status in pregnancy among women living with HIV and associations with neurodevelopmental outcomes of children HIV-exposed uninfected to guide future interventional studies. (more…)
Postdoctoral Scholar-Fellow Dr. Jillian Neary receives 2025 CFAR New Investigator Award
Categories: Awards, Children, Research
Congratulations to Dr. Jillian Neary, Postdoctoral Scholar-Fellow with Global WACh, for receiving a 2025 UW/Fred Hutch Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) New Investigator Award! The two-year award focuses on supporting early career investigators to conduct independent HIV research and apply for future funding to continue their HIV/AIDS research careers.
Dr. Neary’s past work focused on strategies to increase pediatric HIV testing and improve HIV care for adolescents with HIV. Recently, her work focused on molecular epidemiology including HIV viral control among children with HIV and biomarkers of biological aging among children who were exposed to HIV in utero.
With support from the new award, she plans to explore whether breastfeeding and human milk oligosaccharide composition are associated with child telomere length (TL) among children in Kenya who were exposed to HIV in utero. The evidence fills an important need to further understand how breastfeeding may influence short- and long-term health outcomes.
April 25, 2025
Global WACh team supports Sukarya to build a data-driven adolescent health program in Rajasthan
Categories: Research
In August 2024, team members from Global WACh at the University of Washington had the opportunity to visit India as part of a research partnership with Sukarya, a non-governmental organization focused on improving health outcomes and promoting gender equity in India’s slum communities.
Pictured from left to right: Simran Purewal (Student Assistant, UW), Meera Satpathy (Founder and Chairperson, Sukarya), Rishika Mohanty (Project Coordinator, UW)
In 2024, Drs Tickell and Wagner joined forces with Sukarya to win Global Innovation Fund (GIF) supporting the creation of a bi-directional partnerships between UW and Sukarya. With this funding, the UW team has supported Sukarya in design as innovative Social Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) adolescent health program drive by local dat. Members of UW were able to travel to New Delhi, India to conduct a data needs assessment for Sukarya’s SBCC program. This initiative aims to foster positive changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to personal health, hygiene, nutrition, menstrual health, sexual health, family planning, mental health, and substance abuse among adolescents. The program’s goal is to empower adolescent with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed decisions about their health and well-being. The goal of the data needs assessment was to determine the optimal method of digital data collection to track participants changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. (more…)
March 21, 2025
MIND collaborators convene for child development research in Nairobi, Kenya
Categories: HIV and Co-Infections, Mental Health, PrEP, Research
MIND collaborators at the Palacina Suites Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: Mugo Mureithi
It is a remarkable partnership involving several investigators and administrators from UW/Global WACh, Kenyatta National Hospital, University of Nairobi, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Emory University, Fred Hutch, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Makerere University who share knowledge and common resources to generate evidence on biological factors that may cause adverse birth and neurodevelopmental outcomes in young children exposed to HIV but are uninfected. The two-day convening provided a forum to share progress since the inaugural meeting in January 2024 and team retreat at UW in October 2024, and to discuss future directions of research collaborations. (more…)
March 20, 2025
Enterics for Global Health (EFGH) collaborators convene in Kenya for pediatric diarrheal disease research
Categories: Gut Health and Child Survival, Research
The Enterics for Global Health (EFGH) Shigella surveillance study held its annual convening from January 27-30 in Lake Naivasha, Kenya. Over sixty collaborators from around the world gathered to collectively workshop primary manuscripts, and plan for the next phase of the study (“Phase C”) which will focus on results dissemination, supporting secondary data analyses, and conducting implementation research to characterize policy-maker priorities for Shigella vaccine adoption. (more…)
March 19, 2025
Researchers present the latest scientific discoveries in HIV research at CROI 2025
Categories: HIV and Co-Infections, PrEP, Research
Researchers from the US and Kenya at CROI 2025.
Global WACh researchers and collaborators participated in this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), held from March 9th-12th in San Francisco, CA. They shared the latest discoveries in the HIV and Co-Infectious Through the Lifecycle research portfolio related to health outcomes among children exposed to HIV and ART in utero, HIV acquisition and prevention during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and preventative therapies to treat tuberculosis among people living with HIV. (more…)
March 12, 2025
Mobile WACh NEO trial results on the impact of interactive text communication on neonatal mortality in Kenya
Categories: Family Planning, Publication, Research
Each year, approximately 40,000 neonatal deaths occur in Kenya. While a vast majority of these deaths are preventable, newborn care practices and clinical care seeking may be delayed by several factors including lack of knowledge, decision making ability, and poor quality of care. To support mothers during this critical phase, researchers from UW Department of Global Health/Global WACh, Kenyatta National Hospital and Women and Infants Hospital designed the Mobile WACh NEO randomized controlled trial.
Mobile WACh NEO utilized texting communication to provide information, motivation, and real time decision support to mothers in Kenya to help them identify and seek care for neonatal illness. Aiming to determine the effect of tailored, texting communication on neonatal mortality, the study had surprising results: the intervention did not reduce neonatal mortality rates but did increase clinical care seeking.
Read the full Mobile WACh NEO trial paper here: https://lnkd.in/gBp4Qymx
Via the UW Department of Global Health
December 2, 2024
Enterics for Global Health (EFGH) Phase C aims to assess policymaker preferences on Shigella vaccine characteristics
Categories: Awards, Gut Health and Child Survival, Implementation Science, Research
The Enterics for Global Health (EFGH): Shigella surveillance study was launched in 2022 and aims to establish incidence and consequences of Shigella diarrhea among children 6-35 months in Bangladesh, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Pakistan, Peru, and The Gambia and inform future Shigella vaccine trial planning. The study protocol has been published in a supplement in Open Forum of Infectious Diseases. During Phases A and B, the EFGH Consortium built a robust collaborative research infrastructure to facilitate shared scientific decision making and protocol standardization, and recently completed enrollment of 9,476 participants in August 2024.
(more…)
November 27, 2024
Enterics for Global Health (EFGH) Symposium hosted at the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene annual meeting
Categories: Conferences, Gut Health and Child Survival, Research
The symposium was titled: “Preliminary results from The Enterics for Global Health (EFGH) Shigella surveillance study- preparing for Shigella vaccine trials in the target population of young children living in low- and middle-income countries” and aimed to: (more…)
Researchers awarded new grant to test implementation strategies to scale-up transitional care among youth living with HIV in Kenya
Categories: Awards, HIV and Co-Infections, Research
As more children and adolescents living with HIV survive into adulthood, maintaining successful and uninterrupted transitions into adult HIV care clinics has become a priority in the HIV/AIDS research community. Adolescents having “grown up” under pediatric HIV care may experience deep loss of their support system and feel less prepared to assume responsibility for themselves in adult care. The transition is a vulnerable point when adolescents are at risk of disengagement from HIV care altogether. It is critical that they maintain uninterrupted HIV care to stay healthy, maintain low viral load, and reduce further transmission.
Since 2016, Global WACh investigators Drs. Irene Njuguna, Kristin Beima-Sofie, Grace John-Stewart, and Dalton Wamalwa have led efforts to engage the Ministry of Health and local communities in Kenya in the development of the Adolescent Transition Package (ATP), a healthcare worker toolkit that includes structured educational materials and tracking tools to facilitate the transition process. (more…)
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