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Research Opportunities

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Prospective Students

The goal of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge (OxCam) Scholars Program is to create, foster, and advance unique and collaborative research opportunities between NIH laboratories and laboratories at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge. Each OxCam Scholar develops a collaborative research project that will constitute his/her doctoral training. Each Scholar also select two mentors – one at the NIH and one in the UK – who work together to guide the Scholar throughout the research endeavor.

Students may select from two categories of projects: Self-designed or Prearranged. OxCam Scholars may create a self-designed project, which enables students to develop a collaborative project tailored to his/her specific scientific interests by selecting one NIH mentor and one UK mentor with expertise in the desired research area(s). Alternatively, students may select a prearranged project provided by NIH and/or UK Investigator(s) willing to mentor an OxCam Scholar in their lab.

Self-designed Projects 
Students may create a novel (or de novo) project based on their unique research interests. Students have the freedom to contact any PI at NIH or at Oxford or Cambridge to build a collaboration from scratch. The NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) represents a community of approximately 1,200 tenured and tenure-track investigators providing a wealth of opportunity to explore a wide variety of research interests. Students may visit https://irp.nih.gov to identify NIH PIs performing research in the area of interest. For additional tips on choosing a mentor, please visit our Training Plan.

Prearranged Projects
Investigators at NIH or at Oxford or Cambridge have voluntarily offered collaborative project ideas for NIH OxCam Scholars. These projects are provided below and categorized by research area, NIH Institute/Center, and University. In some cases, a full collaboration with two mentors is already in place. In other instances, only one PI is identified, which allows the student to select a second mentor to complete the collaboration. Please note that prearranged project offerings are continuously updated throughout the year and are subject to change.

1 Search Results

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Category:
Health Disparities
Project:

Integrative multi-omics approaches to identifying signatures of asthma in the African diaspora

Project Listed Date:
Institute or Center:
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
NIH Mentor:

Dr. Rasika A Mathias

UK Mentor:
N/A
University:
N/A
Project Details:

Asthma is a common, complex, and chronic disease that is characterized by inflammation of the airways, airway hyperresponsiveness, and bronchospasms. It has major health disparities, and unfortunately populations that bear the greatest burden of disease are minimally represented in genomics research. The Consortium on Asthma among African-ancestry Populations in the Americas (CAAPA) seeks to discover genes and mechanisms conferring risk to asthma in populations of African ancestry, utilizing multi-omic data. A multi-omics approach in nasal epithelium using RNASeq and DNA methylation in CAAPA led to the confirmation of well-known T2 mechanisms in asthma risk, but also identified novel wound healing and medication response signatures, providing new information about the biological mechanisms underlying asthma in the underrepresented African ancestry populations. We have a greatly expanded opportunity including serum proteomics, RNASeq on PBMCs, and additional DNA methylation to test if an expanded systems biology / integrative omics approach can further refine axes of dysregulation in CAAPA and develop models to predict asthma endotypes that are derived off ‘local’ and ‘systemic’ signatures of asthma pertaining to the nasal epithelium and serum/PBMCs, respectively. 

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