How federal funding powers research on healthy aging, chronic disease risk, and tuberculosis strategies
The research described in this article was made possible in part by federal funding awarded to Harvard Chan School scientists in the interest of protecting and promoting health for all. The future of research like this is now in question due to the government’s actions to terminate large numbers of grants and contracts and freeze funding for scientific inquiry and innovation across Harvard University.
For more than a century, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health faculty have conducted groundbreaking research that has led directly to vaccines, treatments, policies, and programs that have saved lives by the millions, in the U.S. and around the world.
In this installment of our series highlighting high-impact research, we feature examples from the School’s Departments of Molecular Metabolism, Biostatistics, and Global Health and Population, all powered by federal funding:
Helping people live healthier lives as they age
“The key tenet of what we want to do is to enable more of us to live out our golden years in good health, where we can be functional, active, and contribute to society.”
—William Mair, professor of molecular metabolism
How can we improve the health of people as they grow older? That’s a question that scientist William Mair has spent 25 years sussing out in his lab.
“There’s a pandemic of older populations across the globe,” said Mair, professor of molecular metabolism and director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Healthy Aging Initiative. “With people living longer, there’s been a huge increase in comorbidities and debilitating chronic health conditions, which we are unprepared to face as a society, both at the level of human suffering and [in terms of] economics and societal restructuring,” he said. Mair’s research is built around the premise that many of those conditions have a root cause in defects in metabolism—essentially, the ability for one’s body to process the nutrients that it eats and do the appropriate things with them. Mair notes that as people become older, they tend to gain fat over time, not just because of lack of exercise and being sedentary but because the body loses the capacity to process nutrients as well as it did when it was younger. That leads to chronic conditions such as cancers, metabolic disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases.
His lab focuses on the sensors in cells that detect the energy and nutrients in the food we eat, how that process can go wrong with time, and how it can be fixed so that one can maintain the body’s capacity to process those nutrients as well as it did when younger. “We study the foundational biology of what the body does with the food, the fuel, that you put into it,” he said. Mair and his team study how changes in nutrition such as intermittent fasting, time-restricted feeding, and dietary restriction can affect the aging process and chronic conditions at the molecular level.
Federal funding has been pivotal to Mair’s work. He calls himself “incredibly lucky” to have had several five-year grants funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over the last 14 years that have allowed him to pursue his research. “If you look at how the aging field has progressed, we have gone from studying nutrient energy sensing in simple systems to understanding the molecular toolkits that make these things work,” he said. “There are drugs in clinical trials now based upon the work by us and others.”
“None of that could have happened without the NIH, and I mean that completely,” he said.
Uncovering nutrition-related health disparities with new statistical methods
“I hope our research will shed light on people’s dietary behaviors so that policymakers can make informed decisions about how best to tailor interventions or guidelines aimed at improving health outcomes among groups at greater risk for disease.”
—Briana Stephenson, assistant professor of biostatistics
Biostatistician Briana Stephenson works to develop statistical methods aimed at uncovering nutrition-related health outcomes in the U.S.
One of her projects led to the development of new methods to identify dietary consumption patterns that are associated with cardiovascular disease risk among understudied and marginalized subgroups in the U.S. population. The new methods enabled Stephenson and her colleagues to focus their analysis on low-income adult populations—a subgroup that tends to be obscured or overlooked in standard population-based models—to understand how dietary intake in this subgroup varied by gender, race, and ethnicity, and how certain dietary patterns or consumption of certain foods can drive cardiometabolic outcomes such as hypertension or diabetes. Going forward, Stephenson hopes to develop other novel methods that provide better understanding of the relationship between a person’s eating habits over time and their risk for negative health outcomes, particularly for vulnerable populations.
In another project, Stephenson examined the connection between restaurant advertising and obesity risk. She found that restaurant advertising varied based on the racial and economic makeup of the county where the restaurant was located. For example, in rural counties, more money was spent on restaurant advertising in areas with higher proportions of Black/Hispanic residents. In urban counties, more was spent on advertising—mostly by fast food chains—in areas with more low-income residents. In the future, Stephenson hopes to explore the connection between restaurant advertising and body mass index across communities, identifying differences by race and income.
Stephenson noted that funding from the NIH has provided crucial support in her work as an early career researcher. “Federal funding has been key to jumpstarting my lab,” Stephenson said. “Without this funding, I would not have the time to develop these methods and attract a brilliant cohort of lab trainees to answer interesting questions that arise from complex data. The funding also has enabled me to form collaborations across and beyond Harvard University to work on our common goals of better understanding subpopulations typically overlooked and underrepresented in many cohort studies.”
Identifying the best options for fighting tuberculosis
“Federal funding has been critical for our work. It has allowed us to do impactful research, and at the same time train and mentor a number of junior scientists going into this field.”
—Nicolas Menzies, associate professor of global health
Tuberculosis (TB) is the world’s leading infectious cause of death—sickening around 10 million people each year and killing more than one million. Even those who survive the disease face years of disability and elevated risk of death. To help policymakers make complex choices around combatting TB—particularly in settings where resources are limited—Nicolas Menzies, a core faculty member of the Harvard Center for Health Decision Science, uses the tools of decision science and quantitative research to analyze potential outcomes.
Funding from the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has helped Menzies’ lab track disparities in infectious disease trends within the United States, investigate the cost-effectiveness of interventions to prevent TB, and quantify the impact of TB diagnosis and treatment in high burden settings.
In 2023, Menzies’s team led analyses for a World Health Organization report that made an economic case for investment in new TB vaccines, demonstrating that TB vaccines in development could be critical for combatting the disease, and would likely be cost-effective if priced similar to other vaccines.
His lab has quantified the additional long-term risk of disease and death experienced by individuals who’ve completed TB treatment, and how that risk can be reduced by initiating treatment earlier in the course of disease. He noted that these findings reinforce the importance of TB prevention and early diagnosis, as well as rehabilitation for TB survivors.
Additional studies from Menzies’ lab have investigated the outcomes of TB diagnosis in routine care, revealing potentially high numbers of false-positive and false-negative diagnoses. “These results highlight how difficult it is to diagnosis TB in many settings, as well as the urgent need for better diagnostic technology,” Menzies said.
“Scientifically, there are lots of questions that still need to be answered. But doing so is a lot harder now,” he said, given funding challenges faced not only by his lab but by research partners in the U.S. and other countries.
Read previous installments of this series
What’s lost when federal funding for research is abruptly terminated (features Ellen Meara, Phuong Pham, and Nancy Krieger)
High-impact research at Harvard Chan School powered by NIH funding (features Manoj Duraisingh, Karen Emmons, and Meredith Rosenthal)
Federal funding drives groundbreaking research at Harvard Chan School (features Alberto Ascherio, Marc Weisskopf, and Karestan Koenen)
