Award Details:

Pilar Hernandez-Con, MD, MSCE, a doctoral student in the department of pharmaceutical outcomes and policy in the University of Florida’s College of Pharmacy, has been awarded a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) diversity supplement grant exceeding $200,000. This grant supports her dissertation research on social determinants of health (SDoH) in individuals with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and those co-infected with HCV and HIV. The supplement was awarded to a parent R01 grant led by Haesuk Park, PhD. Vulnerable populations including individuals with substance use disorders, homelessness, incarceration and limited healthcare access are disproportionately affected by the HCV infection and HCV/HIV co-infection. Given that SDoH can drive high-risk behaviors and hinder access to preventive measures and healthcare systems, effectively integrating SDoH into targeted screening strategies is critical to reducing the prevalence of these infections and mitigating their long-term negative outcomes. Pilar’s study aims to (1) develop and validate a polysocial risk score (PsRS) using natural language processing (NLP) and (2) incorporate the PsRS into a prediction model to enhance the identification of individuals with HCV and HCV/HIV co-infection. Her research is poised to make significant contributions to our understanding of the HCV/HIV syndemic and will be instrumental in guiding public health interventions aligned with the World Health Organization’s goal of eliminating HCV and HIV infections by 2030. A multidisciplinary career development and research mentoring team (Drs. Haesuk Park, Amie Goodin, Serena Guo, Yonghui Wu and Robert Cook) will guide Pilar in the areas of health services research, health policy, epidemiology, biomedical informatics and clinical medicine.