Midcareer Mentoring in Patient-Oriented Research on Genitourinary Aging in Women

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PROJECT SUMMARY This application for a K24 Midcareer Investigator Award will promote Dr. Alison Huang’s mentoring and career development in patient-oriented research on genitourinary aging in women. Dr. Huang is a general internist and women’s health investigator dedicated to advancing scientific understanding and improving management of the impact of aging on women’s health, especially genitourinary health. With funding from the National Institute on Aging and other NIH institutes/centers, she leads a nationally recognized, patient- oriented research program that emphasizes shared factors underlying aging-associated genitourinary dysfunction and other common aging syndromes such as physical function decline, cognitive decline, depression and anxiety, and sleep disruption. Her work to date has created new patient-reported outcome measures used in national and international studies of genitourinary health in older women and provided new evidence to guide diagnostic and treatment strategies for conditions such as urinary incontinence, urogenital atrophy, nocturia, and menopausal symptoms. She has also emerged as a successful mentor of junior clinicians who have published high-impact research, obtained federally funded research awards, and continued to participate in patient-oriented research on older women’s health. Currently there are no K24 awards from the National Institute on Aging that support mentorship for research on genitourinary aging in women or on older women’s health broadly. As a result, Dr. Huang seeks support to expand her mentoring of diverse clinical trainees interested in studying genitourinary health and function in older women as well as the impact of aging and menopause on older women’s health. She will leverage past and current research projects that contribute a rich repository of data on aging-related urinary and vaginal symptoms, aging-related changes in physical and mental function, and associated quality of life in older community-dwelling women. She will address new research questions about relationships between changes in urinary incontinence, physical performance, psychological function, and sleep quality and disruption in older women in response to behavioral, physical activity-based interventions, using ancillary measures incorporated into one of her recently launched clinical trials. She will develop a new workshop series designed to guide early stage investigators in designing and conducting pilot or feasibility trials. She will also carry out a formal mentoring program with plans for recruitment, development, and evaluation of additional mentees from diverse backgrounds. These plans will make full use of the outstanding research training environment at UCSF and leverage leadership positions that Dr. Huang already holds in multiple NIH-funded training programs to identify and support high-quality mentees with the potential to become leaders in patient-oriented research at the intersection of aging and women’s health.