Interview with Dr. Lola Ogunyemi Interim Vice President for Research
Whether it’ s interim or more long term, congratulations on your new post. It is a great acknowledgment of you as a professional. How is your career journey equipped you to lead the University in its research endeavors, even temporarily? I was a founding director of the University’ s Center for Biomedical Informatics and that has required working across disciplines because it’ s a very multidisciplinary field, working with physicians particularly, and introducing them to concepts related to machine learning and AI. Working on projects that require a lot of interaction between groups that don’ t necessarily work together.
And a lot of what’ s needed in the VP for Research role is managing people who don’ t necessarily always work together to have the same vision. Being able to do that in the Informatics role and being able to do that a little bit in my role as Chair of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine before I was called into this interim role, prepared me in some ways for that.
Is the type of recent research work matched to the university’ s mission to eradicate health disparities? As you know, research at CDU is organized around five pillars: cancer, cardiometabolic disease, HIV, health policy and health services research, and mental health. And those areas essentially mirror some of the needs in SPA 6. A lot of the researchers at CDU are sort of motivated or inspired by our mission within those areas. Whether it’ s preclinical research,
or clinical research, a lot of folks are already kind of focused on those areas that are involved with those five pillars. And the goal of eradicating disparities because SPA 6 unfortunately, compared to some of the other service planning areas in Los Angeles, is at a disadvantage in terms of some of the health outcomes in the different areas associated with the five pillars.
We’ ve gotten a lot of training grants, research grants, such as the $ 9 million that Bita Amani, Roberto Vargas and Brandi Desjolais recently got for the Black Maternal Health Center of Excellence is simply outstanding. It is an example of sort of branching out beyond the five pillars to meet a need. Because we’ ve seen the outcomes for black maternal health in the country decline or get worse over time. I think this is a really good time for CDU to step into that area.
And we’ re still doing a lot of important work on HIV, cardiometabolic, and other diseases. LaShonda Spencer has a clinical trial going on right now, looking at long term therapeutics for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis( PrEP). We have a lot of interesting studies. Dr. Theodore Friedman is looking at obesity group visits as a way of managing the obesity epidemic in this area. Some findings may be applicable well beyond Los Angeles. There’ s a lot of good research that’ s going on, tackling health disparities and poor health outcomes in some pretty innovative ways.
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 21