EXITO Pilot Grant Program
Supporting independent investigators who mentor undergraduate students in biomedical research
The Enhancing Cross-disciplinary Innovation and Training for Opportunity (EXITO) Pilot Grant Program is designed to ignite research potential among AHS faculty and students while providing them with the critical tools and experience to secure future funding from federal agencies.
Offering a unique opportunity to design compelling research questions, craft competitive NIH applications and navigate the review process, this program empowers faculty to gather essential preliminary data and foster the next generation of researchers. By embedding students from historically underserved and underrepresented communities in research projects under the mentorship of underrepresented faculty, we strive to build a more inclusive and dynamic research community and, as a result – more equitable health care and social systems.
Projects may include feasibility studies, secondary analyses of existing data, small, self-contained research projects, and projects to develop new research methodologies or technology.
Read the complete RFP
Award information
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Award information
Five non-renewable pilot grants of up to $50,000 per project for a maximum of one year from the date of award.
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Eligibility
Faculty with a terminal degree and a .50 FTE or greater appointment in AHS are eligible to apply.
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Submission instructions
Submissions via email only. Proposals should follow the NIH R03 grant application format and page limits.
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Deadline
October 21, 2024, 7 p.m. Central Time
2025 EXITO Pilot Grant Program awardees
Principal investigator: Karrie Hamstra-Wright, Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition
Project summary: Athletes often experience significant stress post-injury, including anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, selfdoubt, and even suicidal ideation, hindering their well-being and return to sport. Positive psychological responses can improve well-being and rehabilitation outcomes, but specific mental skills training is required to cultivate these responses. Although injured athletes often work with a sports psychologist, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the only structured approach that has been tested and only in two studies with small samples. Despite being promoted as an efficient and effective alternative to CBT, solution-focused mental skills training for injured athletes has not been tested. Over the last 24-months, we developed a solution-focused mental skill training program, the Resilient Athlete Program (RAP), as a community service which we are evolving into a research intervention. The purpose of our study is to: 1). incorporate physiological measures known to vary with psychological stress to RAP, 2). assess the feasibility, acceptability, and proof of concept of RAP. To accomplish this, athletes will enroll in four structured, solution-focused mental skills coaching sessions, each lasting 30-60 minutes over a 4-6 week period. We will assess both psychological and physiological outcomes of stress. Psychological outcomes will be measured using standardized questionnaires and will include stress, athletic identify, fear, readiness to return to sport, resilience, self-efficacy. Physiological measures will include heart rate variability and cortisol levels to assess autonomic and endocrine function. This innovative solution-focused intervention that assesses both psychological and physiological outcomes holds promise for helping injured athletes develop tools for stress, identity, emotional discomfort, fear, pain, resilience, readiness to return to sport, and self-efficacy. It will also inform and guide clinicians regarding the psychophysiologic impact of injury and its role in rehabilitation. Further, our project provides an EXITO scholar a unique opportunity to be a contributing member of a research team exploring a clinically relevant topic.
Principal investigator: Brice Cleland, Department of Physical Therapy
Project summary: Individuals with chronic stroke have long-term walking problems that limit community engagement and quality of life, lead to secondary disabilities, and increase healthcare cost and burden. These walking issues often persist despite rehabilitation. One novel target for stroke gait rehabilitation is interlimb coordination—the phase dependent cyclical relation of the legs. Interlimb coordination is altered during walking after stroke, compromising walking stability, phase transitions, and responses to perturbation and contributing to motor compensation. It is unclear what neural pathways contribute to impaired interlimb coordination after stroke and what impact this has on walking-related outcomes. This proposal consists of two aims to address these issues, with the long-term goal of developing therapeutic interventions to improve interlimb coordination and walking after stroke. Aim 1 will identify which neural sources contribute to impaired interlimb coordination after stroke. During bilateral, cyclical recumbent stepping (analogue of walking), interlimb coordination will be assessed as relative leg phasing. During the task, transcranial magnetic stimulation and peripheral nerve stimulation will be applied to assess supraspinal, interhemispheric, spinal interneuronal, and sensory pathways. The relation of interlimb coordination with these outcomes will be assessed to determine potential contributors. Aim 2 will test the association between interlimb coordination and walking after stroke. Interlimb coordination will be quantified during split-belt treadmill walking, and associations with walking speed, endurance, mobility, independence, daily activity, quality of life, and community engagement will be tested. An additional exploratory aim in a subset of participants will determine the effect of targeted neuromodulation on lower limb interlimb coordination. Electrical stimulation will be applied to three locations in a cross-over study: the primary motor cortex (supraspinal/interhemispheric), thoracolumbar spine (spinal interneuronal), and peripheral nerves (sensory). This proposal is innovative because it focuses on interlimb coordination, which is functionally relevant to locomotor control but understudied. The proposed work will be the first investigation into the neural sources of impaired interlimb coordination after stroke and will clarify how interlimb coordination relates to walking. The results will help guide the development of interventions that target neural pathways to improve interlimb coordination, reduce long-term walking impairment, and decrease individual and societal cost and burden of stroke. As an early career investigator, this project will help jumpstart my career and provide pilot data for a subsequent R01 application. The proposed work is consistent with my career goal of determining the neural pathways and behaviors that contribute to lower limb impairment after stroke and using this information to improve rehabilitation. The goals of this proposal are in line with NIH focus areas; the team of collaborators are well-suited for the work; and the facilities and resources available are ideal for the success of this project.
Principal investigator: Chang Liu, Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition
Project summary: Stroke survivors have persistent poor balance and impaired gait that diminishes their ability to walk without falls, greatly increases healthcare costs, and limits their independence in daily living. The persistent impairments could stem from the fact that current rehabilitation approaches primarily focus on treadmill training, which fails to reflect the complexity of walking and heightened fall risk during daily walking, such as obstacles and turns. Safe walking requires proper cortically mediated processes of motor planning, execution, and visuospatial processing. Therefore, there is a need to understand how stroke disrupts cortical contributions to ecologically valid gait tasks such as curb stepping and turning. This knowledge could help improve current gait rehabilitation and inform evidence-based brain specific interventions to reduce fall risk for stroke survivors. Our primary objective is to determine the differences in cortical activity between people post-stroke and typical adults during ecologically valid gait. We propose to use novel mobile brain imaging with high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) to directly quantify rapid changes (with milliseconds resolution) in cortical activity synchronized to dynamic and highly ecologically valid gait tasks. We hypothesize that compared to typical adults, people post-stroke will demonstrate greater contralesional activity when walking at faster speeds, stepping up on the curb, and spin turns. Further, there is a longstanding need to develop novel EEG electrodes for Afro-textured thick coily hair to facilitate the recruitment of a nationally representative sample for EEG studies. Stroke disproportionately affects Black people as they are twice as likely to experience a stroke and have worse motor recovery compared to White adults. However, 70% of EEG researchers reported having excluded Black individuals due to hairstyle. Therefore, our secondary objective is to design novel EEG electrodes that are compatible with Black hair and optimized for mobile EEG research. Ultimately, the results from this study will be directly used for my next proposal, which aims to establish the association between brain over-activation and fall risk post-stroke. For our long-term goal, the results will also inform the design of evidence-based novel interventions (e.g., non-invasive brain stimulation and neurofeedback approach to reduce brain over-activation) to mitigate maladaptive cortical activity following stroke to reduce fall risk.
