Natasha Halasa’s parents emigrated from Jordan to the United States to make sure their children had a better life. Within one generation, via vaccine and other studies on respiratory illness and acute gastroenteritis in young children, Dr. Halasa is improving the lives of children in both the United States and Jordan.
“Respiratory illness is the number one killer of kids under five worldwide, and diarrhea is number two,” says Halasa, who currently works with a cohort of children under two in Jordan to discover if Vitamin D could be a way of reducing respiratory illness burden in this population. She also leads the New Vaccine Surveillance Network, a CDC-funded project with national reach that helps define the burdens of respiratory illness and acute gastroenteritis in hospitalized children. As well, she is PI of several studies investigating the efficacy of high-dose influenza vaccines.
“My dad’s a microbiologist, and he worked in a children’s hospital for over thirty years, so I was exposed to infectious diseases (no pun intended),” she says when asked what drew her to the field. When she was in grade school, “some of our science projects involved looking at the best mouthwash to eradicate Group A Strep, or the best over-the-counter antiseptic cream to kill staph.” She likes dividing her time between seeing patients and conducting research, feeling that work in each area helps answer questions in the other. “It’s also exciting to see…a burden decrease” because of policies introduced based on her research, she notes. “You can make an impact on individual lives.”
When it comes to writing grants, Halasa values having time and “the amazing resources at Vanderbilt” to prepare. Before she even came to Nashville, she identified mentor Dr. Kathy Edwards and the two wrote a grant together while Halasa was still a third-year resident. Working with an experienced grant writer was invaluable, as was receiving formal training via activities like a grant writing class in the MPH program or from writing workshops. Halasa also looked at many examples of successful grants. And practice, she says, makes perfect. “With each grant you write, you learn how to write a grant.”
Even though her not all of her previous grant applications were successful, she says that the practice gained through each and every proposal better prepared her to succeed. “All the different little components,” such as writing a biosketch and putting a budget together, are vital to a good application and best learned through direct experience.
Also essential is making time to receive feedback from seasoned PIs and edit accordingly, says Halasa, who put together an “informal studio” of readers when she was writing her U01. And starting even further back, cultivating relationships with people who could provide letters of reference—ER doctors and primary care providers, in Halasa’s case—was also critical to her success. The take-home? Do your writing early, and do it often.
With her drive to learn something from every grant she writes, Natasha Halasa will be making an impact on children’s lives for years to come.
Although he didn’t originally envision a career in pediatric oncology, Richard Ho fell in love with it during a rotation in his fourth year of medical school. The relationships he developed with the patients’ families were too rewarding to give up. “It’s obviously an intense emotional situation when you have a child that’s diagnosed with cancer,” he says, and “to be able to be involved in the care of those children, with those families, is really a privilege for me. It’s something I just knew at the time that I was meant to do.”
H. pylori is a bacteria that lives in the stomachs of about half the world’s population. While “we used to think nothing could live in this highly acidic environment, it turns out there’s evidence H. pylori has lived in the stomachs of humans for over 50,000 years.” It is the great causative agent of gastric cancer, one of the most fatal types of cancer, but the curious thing is that not everyone who has it develops the disease. For Epplein, the goal is to understand more about this bug and its relationship with cancer and with humans, particularly in Asia, where there is a high incidence of gastric cancer. “What’s become exciting is trying to understand, maybe from the bug’s point of view, is that it also does good things. It wouldn’t have lasted all this time and become very genetically heterogeneous to survive in all these different stomachs unless there were some good things it did for the host, and vice versa.”
Guide by William Gerin et al. Although aimed at basic scientists, she found the strategy tips such as using white space, bullet points, and underlining to emphasize key points about impact valuable.
Which do you think would help the germ of a thought grow into a brilliant idea: Talking about it with others, who have their own sparkling thoughts and brilliant ideas, and recombining the best parts of each to make them as strong as possible; or locking it away without sunlight and water? If you chose the first option, you’ve stumbled on to Steven Johnson’s central argument: “we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”
If you’re coming from the lab bench, you need to have good communication skills. You need to be comfortable relating what you know to a variety of audiences. Typically, the work you’ll do in policy has very little to do with your specific research area. In addition to communication skills, critical thinking skills — and the tenacity that you learn in the lab to pursue lines of investigation to their logical conclusion — are also necessary in policy.
