(From left to right) Penn researchers Jina Ko, Kevin Johnson, and Sheila Shanmugan were awarded grants through the NIH Common aFund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program (Photo from Penn Today).
Three researchers from Penn are among 85 researchers that will be recognized as recipients of the 2023 National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program.
The High-Risk, High-Reward program is designed to support potentially transformative scientific investigations facing challenges in the conventional peer-review process. The program is dedicated to advancing impactful biomedical or behavioral research spearheaded by exceptionally creative scientists, according to Penn Today.
The awardees are professor of Pediatrics, Biomedical Informatics, and Science Communication Kevin Johnson, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Assistant professor Jina Ko, and Penn Center for Women’s Behavioral Wellness reproductive psychiatrist Sheila Shanmugan.
Johnson's expertise spans health care innovation, health information technology, medication adherence, and social media. His previous research efforts have focused on developing clinical information systems to enhance patient safety and promote adherence to medical practice guidelines.
Johnson also made contributions to e-prescribing and computer-based documentation. Recently, he ventured into science communication by producing a feature length documentary addressing health information transformation, according to Penn Today.
His accolades include being elected to organizations such as the Academic Pediatric Society, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Ko specializes in research to enhance diagnostics and treatment monitoring through single molecule detection from extracellular vesicles and multiplexed molecular profiling. During her doctoral studies in bioengineering at Penn, Ko developed microchip diagnostics driven by machine learning algorithms capable of detecting blood-based biomarkers for conditions like pancreatic cancer and traumatic brain injury.
Ko’s postdoctoral work at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, supported by a Schmidt Science Fellowship and an NIH K99/R00 award, studied the profiling of single cells and extracellular vesicles with high throughput and multiplexing.
Shanmugan is a graduate of Penn's medical training and has a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Her earlier research endeavors revolved around investigating the neuromodulatory impacts of various substances on brain activation and neurochemistry. Using analytical techniques, she also explored the mechanisms underlying sex-based differences in psychopathology.
Currently, Shanmugan's lab employs advanced computational methods and multi-modal neuroimaging techniques to investigate the role of sex as a biological variable in the development of psychopathological conditions.
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