Advancing research on cardiovascular health inequities during Harvard tenure
Akshat Pai, a fifth-year PhD student in the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto, recently completed a tenure as a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University. He was supported by the CIHR Michael-Smith Foreign Study Supplement Award, which helps top Canadian graduate students conduct outstanding research and establish international connections. Additionally, Akshat received the Mitacs Globalink Research Award from Mitacs, a non-profit that plays a key role in Canada’s innovation ecosystem.
During the 4-month term, I worked under the supervision of Dr. Natalie Slopen in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences to advance research on health inequity by: (a) evaluating various neighborhood disadvantage measures to identify which components most strongly relate to cardiovascular health in children, (b) assessing how different neighborhood disadvantage indices and their components vary across different outcomes and sociodemographic groups, and (c) helping to develop a new composite index to evaluate the risk of cardiovascular disease in later life.
Findings from my project will provide a comprehensive picture of how neighborhood disadvantage indices relate to cardiovascular health in children and will enhance our knowledge of how environmental factors impact cardiovascular outcomes. In my primary doctoral work at University of Toronto and The Hospital for Sick Children, I am leading a multi-center, Canada-wide study to explore the role of clinical and non-clinical factors in prediction of pediatric stroke outcomes. I plan to integrate my experience from the place-based analyses at Harvard into my doctoral research, leveraging my background in neuroscience and population health.
By successfully completing the research project at Harvard and after four months of developing the composite place-based measure of cardiovascular disease, I anticipate applying an AI-based index with place-based components to support favorable health outcomes in priority populations. This research aims to provide valuable insight for researchers and practitioners in selecting a place-based measure of social and structural disadvantage for research and public health programming in Canada and the United States.