The University of Maryland Baltimore Institute for Clinical & Translational Research (UMB ICTR) has named Assistant Professor Kristen Coleman as its new KL2 Clinical Research Scholar - a three-year appointment that includes multi-disciplinary mentored career development, formal coursework and professional development opportunities.
The KL2 award is designed to develop the next generation of clinical investigators, guiding scholars toward independent clinical research careers. Dr. Coleman is the first awardee from the University of Maryland, College Park. She will receive $110,000 of salary support plus additional research support for the first two years.
An author of several key research papers on airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, Dr. Coleman continues to conduct groundbreaking infectious disease research as a member of the Public Health Aerobiology Laboratory.
“My work thus far has largely been observational, and although it has been cited in several policy documents, it has not quite had the impact on public health policy that I believe it could,” she said. “This award will equip me to perform the types of studies that tend to be weighted most heavily by decision makers.”
Prior to joining the School of Public Health’s Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health in 2021, Dr. Coleman performed infectious disease research in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, China and the U.S. Her research focused specifically on the surveillance, epidemiology and transmission of respiratory viruses.
Dr. Coleman earned her bachelor’s degree in global studies and doctoral degree in biology at the University of Toledo. Before arriving at UMD, she held academic appointments at Duke-NUS Medical School and the National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.
“This appointment is an opportunity to sharpen my clinical research skills and foster collaborative relationships with clinician scientists and scholars at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and Johns Hopkins University,” she said. “As the threat of an avian influenza virus pandemic looms, I hope to capitalize on existing research to pre-emptively gather solid evidence on how influenza viruses transmit from person-to-person such that we don't find ourselves questioning how best to protect one another during the early critical stages of a pandemic.”
The UMB ICTR is a campuswide clinical translational research initiative supported by the University of Maryland, Baltimore campus. It provides financial support as well as infrastructure, environment, training and workforce to invigorate, facilitate and accelerate clinical translational research to improve patient and community health.