NIH Awards Schnall $10M for Mobile Health Studies

Rebecca Schnall, PhD ’09, Mary Dickey Lindsay Professor of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and associate dean of faculty development at Columbia Nursing, has received more than $10 million from the National Institutes of Health for two projects using mobile health, one for HIV prevention among at-risk men, the other to improve cervical cancer screening in women living with HIV. 

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded Schnall $7,420,722 for a three-year study that will enroll a large, diverse national sample of high-risk young men who have sex with men (YMSM) to better understand factors associated with their HIV-related sexual risk and HIV incidence. The project will also include an efficacy trial of MyPEEPS Mobile, a mobile health HIV prevention intervention that has shown promise in reducing HIV incidence among YMSM. 

Schnall also received for $2,992,618 from the National Cancer Institute for her “Implementation of Screen, Treat, and Triage for Women Living with HIV in La Romana (iSTAR)” study. The five-year project will refine a bundle of strategies (a mobile health clinical decision support tool, practice facilitation, and patient education material) to integrate the World Health Organization-endorsed iSTAR approach for cervical cancer screening within a community-based primary care clinic serving women living with HIV in La Romana, Dominican Republic.