UA Nursing’s Tracy Crane, PhD, RDN, Receives Career Development Award

The University of Arizona Health Sciences Career Development Awards program, established by the Office of the Senior Vice President for Health Sciences in 2014 to provide research training and funding for junior faculty members to foster academic careers in clinical and translational research, has selected its latest round of recipients. UA Nursing Assistant Professor, Tracy Crane, PhD, RDN, was one of four junior faculty members selected for the latest round of awards.

The UAHS CDA program provides the selected scholars with mentorship, research training and salary support of $75,000 for as long as two years (plus $1,500 for travel and $10,000 for research supplies ($5,000 to the candidate, $5,000 to the mentor), for a total award of about $109,900 each year for two years.

“It is an honor to receive the recognition from the UAHS for this CDA. We aim to elucidate the intricate relationships between circadian rhythm, inflammation, metabolic disease and ultimately disease-free survival among women who have recently completed treatment for ovarian cancer." ~ Tracy Crane, PhD, RN, RDN, Assistant Professor, UA College of Nursing 

Dr. Crane plans to develop precision lifestyle interventions that prevent cancer by studying ovarian cancer and “the relationship between circadian rhythm, lifestyle behaviors (diet and physical activity), metabolic and inflammatory indices in 1,205 ovarian cancer survivors who recently completed treatment.” With the addition of other data, “deep learning techniques can be applied in novel ways to study the impact of healthy lifestyle behaviors and disease progression and ultimately result in precision lifestyle interventions with the highest likelihood of impact on human health.”

“It is an honor to receive the recognition from the UAHS for this CDA,” said Dr. Crane.  “We aim to elucidate the intricate relationships between circadian rhythm, inflammation, metabolic disease and ultimately disease-free survival among women who have recently completed treatment for ovarian cancer. We will accomplish this using both traditional analytical approaches as well as deep learning techniques to establish algorithms for identifying women at the highest risk for relapse of ovarian cancer.”

Dr. Crane’s mentors are Nirav Merchant, MS, director of Cyber Innovation and founding director of the UA Data Science Institute; Sairam Parthasarathy, MD, director of the UA Health Sciences Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences and director of the Center for Sleep Disorders at Banner – University Medical Center Tucson; Clayton Morrison, PhD, associate professor, UA School of Information; and Mihai Surdeanu, PhD, associate professor, UA Department of Computer Science.