Dr. Lisa Cassis, UK’s vice president for research, oversees the university’s vast medical and nonmedical research efforts. On this episode of "Behind the Blue," she discusses the many areas UK's Office of Research is prioritizing, including greater diversity and inclusion, the increasing commitment to opportunities for undergraduate research, returning research efforts to higher capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.

The study suggests that localized inflammation in the lungs caused by COVID-19 may be responsible for the increased presence of blood clots in patients, and that the risk of thrombosis could persist after the infection clears.

Jon Thorson and UK were recently awarded a prestigious Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant to study translational chemical biology from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. The $11.2 million grant will fund UK's Center of Biomedical Research Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation.

Through the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, clinical institutions affiliated with the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program are partnering with National Center for Advancing Translational Science and the National Center for Data to Health to study COVID-19 and identify potential treatments and analytics tools.

The program is a collaboration of the UK CURE Alliance and Center for Clinical and Translational Science, who together moved the funding mechanism from concept to first award in 20 days.

Several research labs and core facilities will be testing the antibodies of recovered COVID-19 patients for a study to see how long they protect against reinfection.

The CCTS COVID-19 Biobank was featured on LEX18's Rebound Kentucky series.

The CCTS COVID-19 Research Registry and Specimen Bank will collect specimens from volunteers who have tested positive for or are suspected of having the virus. The biobank will work closely with the UK COVID-19 Unified Research Experts (CURE) Alliance team.

Pharmacy graduate students David Henson (in the MD/PhD program) and David Nardo, PharmD (who were both supported by UK Center for Clinical and Translational Science’s NIH-funded TL1 pre-doctoral training program) are working to uncover potential new indicators of heart disease.

Lori Gresham, informatics project manager for the HEALing Communities Study to reduce opioid deaths, was presented with a congratulatory collection of CCTS-related items.