Julia Maxson earns grant from childhood cancer charity

Julia Maxson, Ph.D., associate professor at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, is among four cancer researchers nationwide to receive a four-year grant from Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting children with cancer.

The new grants support bold, high-impact research aimed at developing safer and more effective treatments for pediatric cancers. This year’s funded projects focus on several challenging childhood cancers, including brain tumors, bone tumors and leukemia.

Maxson’s project seeks to identify epigenetic vulnerabilities in difficult-to-treat forms of juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia, a rare childhood blood cancer.

The awards are part of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation’s Accelerated Grants program, which funds innovative and collaborative pediatric cancer research. The R Accelerated Award provides $800,000 over four years to support independent investigators working to advance cures and improve outcomes for children with cancer.

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Emily Voigt’s research publishes in Nature Communications

Emily Voigt, Ph.D., an associate professor, is a newly recruited OHSU faculty member whose work strengthens OHSU’s and the Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute’s translational vaccine development capabilities. Her research, conducted in her previous position, was published recently in the journal Nature Communications. It demonstrates the success of a nasally delivered pandemic influenza RNA vaccine, representing a major advance in respiratory virus prevention.

To date, RNA vaccines have been highly effective at protecting against severe disease and hospitalization but have not been able to block early stages of respiratory infection or prevent viral transmission. As a result, viral spread can continue, allowing new variants to emerge. This newly published work demonstrates the development of a novel intranasal RNA vaccine technology that induces robust mucosal immune responses, which are widely considered essential for stopping respiratory viral infections at their point of entry and preventing onward transmission. This technology has the potential to protect against severe disease and eliminate the need for needles, while halting respiratory viral epidemics by preventing infection and transmission at the population level.

Voigt’s laboratory focuses on innovating nucleic acid–based vaccine platforms for global health, spanning infectious disease and cancer vaccines from preclinical development through clinical testing. Her research also advances vaccine formulation improvements, with an emphasis on practical, deployable vaccine solutions that could be used worldwide.

Voigt brings a strong record of high-impact, federally funded research, with prior support exceeding $40 million from the NIH, Department of Defense, and Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Her arrival at OHSU represents a major strategic expansion of institutional capacity in translational vaccine science and positions OHSU and VGTI for future leadership in next-generation vaccine development.

“I am excited to continue my research at OHSU, which expands our ability to advance this lifesaving work at a world-class medical institution with all its resident resources and expertise,” Voigt said.

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Shannon Smith earns 2026 Yun Long Ong Memorial Award

The OHSU Advanced Practice Nursing Council is pleased to announce colleague Shannon Smith, PMHNP-BC, M.P.H., as the recipient of the 2026 Yun Long Ong “Lucky Dragon” Memorial Award. This award honors the legacy of Yun Long Ong, a beloved nurse who passed away in September 2020, and recognizes an Oregon Advanced Practice Nurse who exemplifies his values of unshakable optimism, warmth and exceptional patient care.

Smith is a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and OHSU alumnus with more than a decade of experience in HIV care and community mental health, including 10 years serving highly marginalized populations. His background also includes eight years at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he cared for veterans facing severe trauma, chronic pain, substance use disorders and moral injury. He currently practices at the OHSU Richmond Clinic and the Multnomah County Health Department HIV Clinic.

Known for his calm, steady presence, Smith builds trust quickly with patients and is a reliable support for colleagues. He practices through a trauma-informed lens, viewing symptoms as survival strategies rather than pathology, which is an approach that fosters strong therapeutic relationships and improved patient engagement. A humble and collaborative leader, Shannon bridges medical, behavioral health, and social services, and is widely respected for his generosity in mentoring and team support.

Please join the APRN Awards and Nomination Committee in congratulating Smith on this well-deserved honor.

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Miranda Lim sleep study research publishes in Nature Communications

Miranda Lim, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurology, is an author of a recently published article in the journal Nature Communications that provides the strongest human evidence to date that sleep plays a critical role in clearing toxic proteins from the brain, which is an essential process long believed to protect against neurodegenerative disease. Lim’s research brings together a multi-institutional academic team and industry partners in a first-of-its-kind randomized crossover trial.

The study followed 39 participants who underwent both normal sleep and total sleep deprivation. Researchers found that after a night of normal sleep, morning blood levels of amyloid beta and tau (proteins closely linked to Alzheimer’s disease) were significantly higher than after sleep loss. Rather than signaling harm, these increases reflect enhanced overnight clearance of the proteins from brain tissue, directly demonstrating in humans a mechanism that had previously been supported mainly by animal studies.

To capture how this process unfolds, the team paired advanced plasma biomarker analysis with continuous overnight monitoring of brain electrical activity, cerebrovascular dynamics, and fluid transport within the brain. These measurements were enabled by a novel device recently validated in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Together, the data revealed a distinct sleep-related glymphatic signature marked by deep-sleep EEG patterns, increased cerebrovascular pulsatility, and reduced resistance to fluid flow.

Researchers say the findings position glymphatic function as a powerful and modifiable therapeutic target. By directly linking sleep physiology, biomarker shifts, and brain clearance pathways in humans, the study represents a pivotal advance for Alzheimer’s disease prevention, early detection and treatment — and reinforces growing efforts to develop interventions that enhance the brain’s natural ability to clean itself during sleep.

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OHSU Richmond clinic earns 2025 OHSU HCC Impact Award

The Hierarchical Condition Categories team has named OHSU Primary Care, Richmond, as the recipient of the 2025 OHSU Health HCC Impact Award, recognizing the clinic’s outstanding commitment to closing HCC gaps and improving patient care.

Throughout the past year, the Richmond team led the system in performance improvement, achieving the highest gap-closure increase at 5% and continuing a strong upward trend year over year. The team also played a key role in supporting a pilot of wellness visits and well-child checks with preventive medicine residents, provided valuable feedback to strengthen HCC workflows, and remained highly engaged with the Central Care Coordinator team to support outreach efforts. Their innovation, collaboration, and sustained focus on improvement set a clear standard for excellence across OHSU Health.

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Eric Simpson recognized as global leader in eczema research on JAK inhibitors

A new bibliometric analysis has identified Eric Simpson, M.D., M.C.R., professor of dermatology, as one of the world’s leading researchers on janus kinase, or JAK, inhibitors for atopic dermatitis, commonly known as eczema. The study, which reviewed global research published between 2014 and 2024, ranked OHSU tied for first worldwide in institutional research output and named Simpson the second most prolific author globally on the topic.

JAK inhibitors represent a transformative, targeted, non-steroidal class of therapies for moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis and have received Food and Drug Administration approval, becoming widely accepted in clinical practice. The analysis examined 776 publications and highlighted the United States as the leading contributor to JAK inhibitor research, with OHSU and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai at the forefront.

The findings underscore OHSU’s and Simpson’s significant impact on advancing eczema treatment and shaping the global research landscape for innovative therapies that are improving outcomes for patients worldwide.

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David Dorr earns $500,000 grant from Chickasaw Federal Health

David Dorr, M.D., M.S., professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology in the Division of Informatics, Clinical Epidemiology and Translational Data Science, known as DICE, has received a $500,000 contract from Chickasaw Federal Health, LLC, to evaluate the interoperability of behavioral health data elements.

The project supports a national pilot program tied to the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability, a federal standard established by the assistant secretary for technology policy in the office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. With the recent expansion of the standard to include behavioral health data, the pilot will focus on mapping and exchanging behavioral health data elements across community-based behavioral health sites.

OHSU is one of 10 organizations nationwide selected for the pilot. Through its participation, OHSU will exchange and evaluate behavioral health data to assess interoperability and inform future implementation of the new standard.

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CPP funding supports interval breast cancer research

The OHSU Knight Cancer Institute Community Partnership program provided critical funding to assist Oregon State University researchers in their recent publication examining women’s experiences with interval breast cancer titled, “Screening Isn’t Your Ticket to Vacation: In-depth Interviews With Women in the United States Who Experienced an Interval Breast Cancer,” in Sage Journals.

CPP awarded $10,000 to the project, “Women’s experience with interval breast cancer,” which launched Feb. 1, 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began. When public health restrictions made the originally planned focus groups impossible, CPP staff worked closely with principal investigator Veronica Irvin, Ph.D., M.P.H., at OSU to approve a timeline extension and methodological modifications, allowing the research to move forward successfully.

Interval breast cancers occur after a non-suspicious mammogram but before the next scheduled screening, which often leads to a diagnosis at a later stage. Through in-depth interviews, the study found that symptoms were first discovered by the women themselves, with 75% noticing a lump during self-exams or daily activities. Participants described surprise that screening tools can miss cancers and emphasized the importance of listening to one’s body, prioritizing health and continuing self-breast exams alongside routine mammography.

By supporting this work during an unprecedented time, CPP helped advance community-informed research with clear implications for breast cancer prevention and education.

Learn more about CPP grants at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute Community Partnership Program website.

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Recognize team or individual achievements with OHSU Accolades

Every day, OHSU members do amazing things. We want to celebrate the significant achievements of OHSU members, units, and programs, such as awards, grants, appointments, publications, and public recognitions. We publish these announcements regularly on OHSU Now and OHSU News: Awards and Accomplishments to celebrate with all 27,000 of our members and our community. Nominate yourself, a colleague or any OHSU member using this Accolades intake form. Submissions edited for length and clarity.