Ian Wall, CBDSM Research Associate, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for his upcoming doctoral work in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The three-year award includes an annual stipend, tuition allowance, and travel allowance. Ian, who works with Scott Kim, MD, PhD, and Ray DeVries, PhD, will be starting his program at Madison in fall 2010.

Holly Witteman, Research Fellow at CBDSM, has been awarded a $25,000 Robert Derzon Post-Doctoral Grant from the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making for her project entitled "Development and Evaluation of Interactive Interfaces for Values Exploration and Clarification." Pending IRB approval, the project is slated to commence in April 2010. Witteman has been working since fall 2009 under the mentorship of Angela Fagerlin. CBDSM extends its congratulations!

is the title of a project assessing the impact of different features of a web-based decision aid to improve patient decision making for asymptomatic carotid disease. This project was recently funded by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. Ethan A. Halm, MD, MPH (Univerity of Texas Southwestern Medical Center) will be working with CBDSM's Brian Zikmund-Fisher, PhD, on this research that will compare two decision aids related to surgery to prevent stroke.  

CBDSM's Scott Kim, MD, PhD, has recently been funded by the NIH for a project on therapeutic misconception and the ethics of sham surgery. Ethicists have raised concerns that elderly patients with a progressively debilitating disease such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) may be too vulnerable for research that involves novel, invasive interventions that use a controversial masking design, i.e., sham neurosurgical controls. Are these subjects laboring under a therapeutic misconception, erroneously believing that research, rather than being an experimental procedure for the sake of creating knowledge to help future patients, is actually a novel form of treatment intended to help them? Dr. Kim’s project will study four actual PD clinical trials that involve a sham surgery control. Collaborators include R. DeVries, K. Kieburtz, R. Wilson, S. Frank, and H.M. Kim. Pilot funding came from the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

 The University of Michigan's Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research has been renewed for another five years, through August 2013, by the National Institutes of Health. The purpose of the $8.8 million award is to develop an efficient, theory-driven model for generating health behavior interventions that is generalizable across health behaviors and sociodemographic populations. The UM Center for Health Communicaitons Research, under principal investigator Victor Strecher, MPH, PhD, coordinates the core of this Center of Excellence. CBDSM Director Peter A. Ubel, MD, and CBDSM faculty member Angela Fagerlin, PhD, are leading Project 3, in which they will conduct Internet studies to test several movel ways of tailoring a prostate cancer decision aid, with the goal of identifying interventions that increase the perceived salience of patient preferences. After they have determined the best interventions, they will modify the current prostate cancer decision aid and then test it in men with newly diagnosed localized prostate cancer. Co-investigators on Project 3 are John T. Wei, MD, and Brian Zikmund-Fisher, PhD, at the University of Michigan and James Tulsky, MD, and Stewart Alexander, PhD, at Duke University.

Brian Zikmund-Fisher, PhD, a CBDSM investigator and Director of the CBDSM Internet Survey lab, is the principal investigator on an Investigator Initiated Research award from the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making that began in October 2008.  The grant, entitled "Learning by Doing: Improving Risk Communication Through Active Processing of Interactive Pictographs," will fund the development and testing of of Flash-based interactive risk graphics that research participants or patients can use to visually demonstrate how likely they believe some event is to occur. Dr. Zikmund-Fisher hopes that people who create risk graphics themselves will have a better intuitive understanding of risk than people who just view static images. Co-investigators on the award include Angela Fagerlin, Peter A. Ubel, and Amanda Dillard.

CBDSM faculty member Dylan Smith, PhD, is the principal investigator on an NIH R-21 grant beginning in spring 2008. Dr. Smith will be measuring health-related quality of life in older adults with chronic illnesses, evaluating existing recall-based approaches against two new tools that are designed to be robust to memory biases. Co-investigators with Dr. Smith are Peter A. Ubel, Norbert Schwarz, and Susan Murphy.

Amanda Dillard, PhD, has been awarded a $25,000 George Bennett Postdoctoral Grant by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. With this funding, Dr. Dillard will conduct surveys to examine whether certain types of patient testimonials have a beneficial influence on knowledge, satisfaction, and interest in shared health care decision making, specifically in the context of a decision aid related to colon cancer screening. She will use social cognitive theory, social comparison theory, and risk processing perspectives to guide her hypotheses about testimonials.

Dr. Dillard’s postdoctoral position at CBDSM is funded by VA Health Services Research and Development, Ann Arbor, Michigan.