Research and Collaborative Opportunities
During training, prior fellows have successfully applied for and received a number of awards and grants to support their training. Recent awards include: NIH T32 Vaccinology/Immunology Training Grant, Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS) Health Disparities Grant, Strauss Global Health Award, NIH K12 Pediatric Scientist Development Program (PSDP).
Antimicrobial Stewardship Program
The Cincinnati Children's Antimicrobial Stewardship Program (ASP), directed by David B. Haslam, MD, and supported by Infectious Diseases-trained clinical pharmacists, providing hands-on training in the practical work of building and running an institutional stewardship program. Training also focuses on structured grounding in the CDC Core Elements, Joint Commission requirements and the metrics that define program success (days of antibiotic therapy adjusted for census, resistance trends and balancing measures). For fellows considering stewardship as a career path, training extends to the leadership and operational skills, including stakeholder engagement, business-case development and program evaluation.
Clinical Informatics and AI-based Clinical Decision Support
The ASP also serves as a platform for applied informatics and AI research. Active projects include machine-learning models for predicting risk of hospital-acquired infection and antimicrobial resistance, large-language-model-based extraction of structured information from clinical notes to support real-time stewardship decisions and integration of FHIR-based data pipelines with the electronic health record. Fellows with interests in informatics, data science or AI can engage with these projects at any depth, from clinical use-case definition through model development and deployment. Trainees with complementary bench or genomics interests can also connect with the Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics Laboratory for work in genomic epidemiology and AMR surveillance.
Discovery Research
Faculty in Division of Infectious Disease participate in discovery-based research across a range of topics including anti-viral immunity and vaccines (David I. Bernstein, MD, MA), computational analysis of immunity and vaccine responses (Thomas Hagan, PhD), metagenomics and microbiome (David B. Haslam, MD), microbial pathogenesis and advanced imaging (Sanjay K. Jain, MD), Ebola virus immunity (Karnail Singh, PhD), HIV infection (Paul Spearman, MD), enteric virus pathogenies and immunity (Ming Tan, PhD) and developmental shifts in infection susceptibility (Sing Sing Way, MD, PhD).
The Center for Inflammation and Tolerance is a cross-divisional group of faculty housed investigating how inflammation is regulated from a variety of complementary perspectives housed in the Division of Infectious Diseases. This includes innate immunity, obesity, fibrosis, allergy, intestinal inflammation, autoimmunity, vaccinology and developmental shifts in these immunological parameters. The March of Dimes Ohio Collaborative for Prevention of Preterm Birth is one of five prematurity research centers funded by the March of Dimes housed in the Division of Infectious Diseases. This is a cross-disciplinary group of physicians and scientists with a common goal to improve the health of infants and children through improved pregnancy outcomes.
Infectious Diseases Epidemiology & Surveillance
The goals of our program include innovative epidemiological, clinical and immunologic research through unique U.S. maternal-birth cohorts linked to a large specimen repository (hundreds of thousands of specimens from pediatric cohorts) to understand the natural history of infection and immune responses to major pediatric infectious diseases and vaccinations, contributing to multi-site, active, population-based surveillance for pediatric respiratory and enteric medical visits to determine disease burden, costs and the epidemiology of these infections and addressing unmet vaccine safety clinical questions and research needs through the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) project.
Our program also has experience sponsoring Pediatric ID fellows on the divisional NIH T32 Vaccinology Training Grant, including pediatric ID fellow research projects on disease surveillance and pediatric antimicrobial usage, mentoring students at the College of Medicine and Public Health on maternal-infant cohorts, and guiding dissertations on the associations between microbiome and infectious disease outcomes.
Immunocompromised Host Program
The Immunocompromised/Transplant Infectious Disease program focuses on clinical care, education and research in patients with immunocompromising conditions, including but not limited to children with cancer, solid-organ and hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients and the growing population of patients receiving immunosuppressive biologic therapies. The pediatric transplant and cancer programs at Cincinnati Children’s are among the largest programs nationally, providing comprehensive clinical training and broad opportunities for scholarship.
Infection Prevention & Control
The Infection Prevention & Control program has learning opportunities that build towards a career in IPC with multidisciplinary projects involving quality improvement, epidemiology, sustainability and diagnostic stewardship. The program interfaces with not only the typical clinical, regulatory and safety teams, but also the environment of care (air quality, water management, construction, etc.) and employee health which makes for a robust and diverse training setting.
Vaccine Research Center
The Vaccine Research Center is an internationally recognized unit for the development and evaluation of vaccines. With mentoring from our 6 physician-scientists, trainees have the ability to receive hands-on training for protocol and consent form development, regulatory requirements for research and conduct of clinical trials. In the recent past, trainees have assisted in development and implementation of clinical trials evaluating vaccines for the prevention of enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC), Shigella and Leishmaniasis.
Trainees also have opportunities to conduct secondary projects from samples collected as part of the clinical trials with recent examples being furthering our understanding of the immune response following an infection with norovirus and the immune response to immunocompromised children being re-vaccinated after solid organ or bone marrow transplant.
We are a proud member of the NIH funded Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (VTEU) which, among other things, provides trainees the opportunities to participate in a mentoring group headed by leading vaccinologists and educators in the VTEU network. The mentorship program has been extremely successful with over 20 manuscripts per year published by mentees as well as a very high level of success with obtaining K-awards.
Cincinnati Children’s leadership continues to demonstrate a significant commitment to vaccinology through the recent completion of our new Winslow Research Pavilion. This is a 45,000 square foot building that includes 10 clinic rooms, 16 overnight stay rooms for Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) studies, along with a laboratory and investigational pharmacy. It truly is a “one-stop shop” for the conduct of clinical research.
Other Collaborative Opportunities
- Clinical microbiology laboratories with complete bacteriology, mycology and virology facilities for routine studies, as well as special procedure capabilities (e.g. culture of fastidious organisms, special stains of direct specimens).
- Combined serology laboratories with capacity for routine antibody determinations.
- Chemistry laboratory with equipment available for chemical or immunochemical determination of selected drug levels.
- BSL2/BSL3 containment facilities and animal facilities located near the laboratory facilities.
- The International Adoption Center, provides comprehensive pre- and post-adoption evaluations for families and adoptive children, conducts general educational activities and analyzes the prevalence of various disease and the efficacy of immunizations in adoptees.
- Epidemiology programs conducted under the direction of the CDC (New Vaccine Surveillance Network) as well as industrial sponsors.
- A partnership with the Global Health Center that offers multiple opportunities for research outside of the USA in Central and Latin America, Asia and China.
- Fellows can also develop research projects outside of the infectious diseases division as there are numerous multi-disciplinary opportunities, still related to infectious diseases, both within Cincinnati Children’s and the University of Cincinnati.
