‘Geisel Receives $12 Million NIH COBRE Grant to Support Research Program for Implementation Science at Dartmouth’ (Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine News – September 11, 2025 – Full Article)
Article Excerpt: Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine has been awarded a 5-year, $12 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a center of excellence and multidisciplinary research program for implementation science—an emerging discipline in biomedical research that focuses on effectively moving scientific evidence into healthcare policy and practice.
The new program will be funded as an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) from the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The IDeA program builds research capacities in states that historically have had low levels of NIH funding by supporting basic, clinical, and translational research; faculty development; and infrastructure improvements.
“The elevation of implementation science to a standalone discipline is needed to guide change and instill practice improvements in clinical care and healthcare systems,” says Duane Compton, PhD, dean of Geisel. “I’m very excited that we are at the leading edge for advancing this contemporary approach through Dr. Jeremiah Brown’s leadership.”
“With federal funding for implementation research growing rapidly, there remains a critical gap in academic development opportunities for early-stage investigators to be trained and mentored in implementation science along with a lack of resources to support their academic trajectory toward independence with RO1 funding,” explains Brown MS ’03 PhD ’06, professor of epidemiology at Geisel and founding director of the Dartmouth Center for Implementation Science, who will serve as the principal investigator of the COBRE grant.
To address these needs, the new COBRE program will be organized around three key aims. The first is to establish a multidisciplinary COBRE center of excellence for implementation science. The second is to implement and sustain a vibrant organization and management plan for the Center, which will be comprised of an administrative core and an implementation research core.
Leading the administrative core will be Brown and Julia Shaw, MPH, who will serve as research and program director for the Center. The implementation research core will be directed by Sarah Lord, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and of biomedical data science, with co-director Kelly Aschbrenner, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and principal scientist at Dartmouth Health.