The NPCRC awards grants to investigators conducting research projects aimed at relieving suffering and achieving the best possible quality of life for patients living with serious illness and their caregivers. The Pilot Project Support Grants are designed for mid-senior investigators to help them develop pilot data for larger externally funded research projects. The Junior Faculty Career Development Awards are designed to provide funding to promising junior investigators to protect their time for research.

In a collaborative parallel initiative with the NPCRC, the American Cancer Society (ACS) also supports pilot projects in palliative care and cancer modeled on the NPCRC’s program. View the ACS Grantees.

2010 Grantees

Cynthia A. Gerhardt, PhD

Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology
The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
Dr. Gerhardt will examine the feasibility of conducting prospective research with families in pediatric palliative care. She will compare symptom burden and quality of life in children with and without life-limiting illnesses, examine the impact on families, and identify factors related to child and family adjustment near the end of life.

Robert Gramling, MD, DSc

Assistant Professor
University of Rochester
Dr. Gramling will use direct observation and epidemiological methods to examine the degree to which palliative care clinician approaches for communicating prognosis are associated with subsequent choices to pursue an exclusively palliative plan of treatment. This work will focus on prognostication behaviors that endorse optimism and hope in the context of advanced illness and will begin to explore how different communication strategies interact with patient race, gender and/or educational attainment in their association to palliative treatment choices.

Laura C. Hanson, MD, MPH

Associate Professor, Co-Director, Palliative Care Program
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
This study, titled “Decision Support and Goals of Care for Dementia,” uses the concepts of shared decision-making to test an innovative decision support intervention for family surrogates who must make health care choices for people with advanced dementia. Family surrogates will see an audiovisual decision aid, and participate in a structured care planning meeting with an interdisciplinary team, to make choices about goals of care and treatment. This approach to goals of care communication will be refined using semi-structured interviews with surrogates, to clarify the links between goals and treatments to meet goals of care in dementia.

Kelly N. Michelson, MD, MPH

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Children's Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University
Dr. Michelson will use mixed methods to study family conferences in the pediatric intensive care unit. She seeks to develop an understanding on the role and impact of family conference on end-of-life care decision making and ultimately to develop interventions that optimize family-centered communication during family conferences in the pediatric intensive care unit.

Yael Schenker, MD

Assistant Professor
University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Schenker will characterize and compare the quality of communication about end-of-life issues with seriously ill African American and Caucasian patients. She will use direct observation and stimulated recall interviews to identify physician communication behaviors that are consistent or inconsistent with patient preferences.

Renee D. Stapleton, MD MSc

Assistant Professor of Medicine
University of Vermont College of Medicine
Dr. Stapleton, along with her co-investigators Drs. J. Randall Curtis and Dee Ford, will study an innovative “informed assent” approach toward in-hospital CPR (informing patients that their underlying chronic illness renders outcomes after CPR so poor that CPR is not performed while allowing them to actively disagree) in chronically ill patients with reduced life expectancy. She will first conduct focus groups of patients, families, and physicians to refine the informed assent intervention. This will be followed by a randomized pilot study to assess the feasibility of and determine sample size for a large RCT of informed assent versus usual care.

Anne Walling, MD, PhDc

Assistant Professor of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Anne Walling will study transplant patients as a model for patients with a realistic hope for cure. She will investigate how consideration of organ transplantation affects medical care received, and using qualitative methods, examine barriers and facilitators to patient-physician communication around advance care planning in this population.

Alexi Wright, MD

Instructor in Medicine
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School
Dr. Wright's research focuses on improving advanced cancer patients' quality of life by identifying effective uses of medical therapies at the end-of-life. Her research focuses on patient-oncologist communication, the formation of treatment preferences, and variations in practice patterns. Through her research she hopes to develop an evidence base to guide advanced cancer patients' decision-making in areas where there are currently limited data, e.g., the use of palliative chemotherapy in advanced, platinum-refractory ovarian cancer.

2009 Grantees

Kyle R. Allen, DO

Medical Director, Post Acute and Senior Services and Chief Division of Geriatric Medicine
Summa Health System
Dr. Allen, along with his co-investigator Dr. Steven Radwany, will conduct a randomized pilot study to determine the feasibility of a fully powered study to test the effectiveness of an in-home interdisciplinary care management intervention for improving global measures of quality palliative care in new enrollees into Ohio’s community-based long-term care Medicaid waiver program, PASSPORT.

Jane L. Givens, MD, MSCE

Instructor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Hebrew SeniorLife
Dr. Givens will use quantitative and qualitative methods to study the mental health of family members of nursing home residents with advanced dementia.  The goal of her work is to identify potentially modifiable aspects of the nursing home environment associated with better mental health outcomes.

Scott A. Irwin, MD, PhD

Director, Psychiatry Programs
The Institute for Palliative Medicine at San Diego Hospice
Dr. Irwin will assess the feasibility of conducting a randomized, controlled, safety and efficacy trial of rapidly treating major depressive episodes with methylphenidate monotherapy in patients receiving hospice care.

Jennifer W. Mack, MD, MPH

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital Boston
Dr. Mack will evaluate the relationship between hope and prognostic disclosure among parents of children with advanced cancer.  She will assess the ways physicians address prognosis and hope in their communication with parents, the meanings parents ascribe to hope, and how the interplay between hope and prognosis communication affects end-of-life decision-making.

Ramona Rhodes, MD, MPH

Assistant Professor of Medicine
University of Texas Southern Western
Dr. Rhodes will examine and describe racial differences in the perception of the quality of hospice care by examining hospice-level variability associated with African American perceptions of the quality of hospice services and to identify processes of care that can reduce these disparities.

Alexander K. Smith, MD, MS, MPH

Assistant Professor of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Smith will investigate factors associated with emergency department use at the end of life, and using direct observation, examine communication around goals of care for seriously ill elders seen in the emergency department.