Four Studies Awarded NUCATS Pilot Funding
For many children, communication skills are assessed in infancy and early childhood to identify language-related developmental delays. However, these assessments are often designed primarily for monolingual English speakers and focus largely on spoken language, overlooking both the unique trajectories of bilingual children and the important role of nonverbal gestures in early communication.
A new research project led by Catherine Han, PhD, MS & Miriam Novack, PhD aims to bridge this gap and improve the assessment of language development for infants, young children and beyond. “By accounting for bilingual language exposure in current scoring approaches and incorporating nonverbal communication, such as gesture, this work aims to improve early identification of developmental delays,” say Han and Novack. “The principles developed through this project could inform the design and interpretation of language-related neuropsychological assessments across the lifespan and across conditions.” In their research, Han and Novack will leverage the NIH Baby Toolbox, a cutting-edge suite of digital developmental assessments, alongside modern psychometric methods.
Han and Novack’s study is one of four projects recently selected for the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute’s 2026 Translational Science Pilot Award program. Each year, NUCATS selects proposals for highly innovative, multidisciplinary pilot projects that will advance translational science, with each receiving up to $50,000 in funding. The other 2026 awardees are Christopher McGraw, MD, PhD, Colin Hisey, PhD, MS & Lisa Volpatti, PhD, MS, and Stephanie Young, PhD.
The award provides critical support to pursue work we are passionate about and will also help us generate preliminary findings needed to support our future grant applications.”
“We were thrilled and deeply grateful to receive NUCATS Pilot Funding,” Han and Novack say. “The award provides critical support to pursue work we are passionate about and will also help us generate preliminary findings needed to support our future grant applications.”
McGraw’s project will investigate clinical notes and how researchers can more efficiently extract meaningful information from them to improve patient care. Although physicians routinely document detailed and valuable information, these notes are often written in unstructured formats, making large-scale analysis challenging.
“Our project aims to solve this problem by developing a step-by-step, reproducible method for building clinical data extraction systems that any research team can follow,” says McGraw. “These tools will help hospitals and researchers unlock the information in clinical notes more quickly and reliably, ultimately improving patient care across many conditions.” McGraw and his team will test their methods in two different medical areas at Northwestern Medicine and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab to prove their effectiveness across different specialties.
Hisey and Volpatti’s study focuses on developing a reliable testing pipeline for nanoscale, cell-derived particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs), which can carry therapeutic cargo throughout the body—a promising potential treatment for conditions such as lung fibrosis.
“By linking how EVs are made and what they contain to how they behave in tissues and in vivo, we hope to accelerate translation from early lab experiments to therapies that are ready for clinical trials,” say Hisey and Volpatti. “Ultimately, this work is important because it addresses a key bottleneck of how to make these promising biologic therapies consistently, safely, and at a scale in a way that is realistic for future applications with real patients.”
Young’s project aims to improve and better understand adherence to digital tools used for long-term monitoring in primary care. Her research will focus specifically on MyCog, a digital cognitive screening system in the NIH Toolbox that promotes early detection of cognitive decline in older adults through sensitive assessments and streamlined workflows. However, clinics often pilot new digital tools and then stop using them over the long term, thus losing important data about a patient's personal trajectory over time.
“My long-term goal is to use what we learn to redesign MyCog so it better supports the kind of repeated, over-time monitoring primary care actually needs,” Young says. “This funding will help us analyze EHR data to find patterns in year-over-year adoption and conduct interviews with clinicians and patients to understand how long-term monitoring can be successful.”
While each pilot project varies in subject and scope, they all aim to leverage NUCATS support to bring their research to patients faster and more efficiently. “This funding fills a critical gap by supporting key early-stage work,” say Hisey and Volpatti. “It will allow us to generate the foundational data and workflows we need to compete for larger NIH grants and to move this platform closer to impacting patients.”
The NUCATS Translational Science Pilot Awards program, co-led by Dennis Li, PhD and Salva Balbale, PhD, annually seeks proposals for highly innovative, multi-disciplinary pilot projects that will advance translational science. Research reported in this publication was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Grant Number UM1TR005121. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Written by Kevin Castro
