HANOVER — The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth has received a five-year, $12 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to help ensure best practices in health care are actually followed.
“We are thrilled to be taking these major steps forward, not only in advancing implementation science at Dartmouth but in helping to move the field of implementation science globally forward, especially in a very rough and turbulent funding environment,” Jeremiah Brown, a professor of epidemiology, said in a news release earlier this month.
Implementation science is an emerging field that aims to bridge the gap between research and routine medical practice.
Usually, only about 25% of evidence-based practice guidelines — such as when patients ought to take aspirin for certain heart conditions — are routinely followed, Brown said in a phone interview last week.
“Implementation science helps to bridge that gap between what we know we should be doing to doing what we should be doing,” he said.
In the past year, the NIH has committed almost $5 billion less in research grants to U.S. institutions than in the year before — with $30 billion committed from July 2024 through June 2025, compared to $34.7 billion in the same time frame the year prior, according to an August study from the Association of American Medical Colleges, an academic nonprofit medical organization.
This decrease is “the result of disruptions and slowdowns in the processes for awarding federal grants,” the study found. Last spring, the Trump administration terminated hundreds of grants supported by the NIH — some of which were later reinstated, but again derailed by an August U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Brown, who will serve as the research’s principal investigator, said amid this challenging environment, it helped this grant’s competitiveness that it is taking a “multidisciplinary approach” and that “the projects and work that we proposed were not politically divisive,” said .
Though it took “a while” to get the notice of award for this grant, the time was not much different than prior years, Brown said.
The grant is funded as a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, or COBRE, which helps to establish centers that build capacity for a particular area of study, Brown said.
Geisel has previously not had infrastructure or any large capacity for implementation science, said Brown. The goals of the grant are to build capacity in implementation science research, to train junior faculty and to recruit additional faculty in the field to Dartmouth, Brown said.
The grant will fund 50% of the salaries of about five to eight research project leaders, allowing them to develop unique implementation science research proposals, the release said.
The grant also allows Geisel to form an implementation research core that will both support junior faculty with projects and provide opportunity for more collaboration at Dartmouth and other institutions, Brown said.
In addition to new monthly training seminars on implementation science, Geisel will host its first symposium on the topic on Sept. 24.
