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.
The third aim of the new program is to accelerate the transition of junior faculty into NIH grant-competitive investigators, preparing them for independent careers as leaders in the field. As part of this effort, the COBRE grant will fund 50 percent of the salaries of at least five to eight research project leaders, allowing them to develop innovative implementation science research proposals across a broad range of areas.
This group will include: Caitlin Howe, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology; Terri Lewinson, PhD, MSW, associate professor of health policy and clinical practice and of epidemiology; Elizabeth Murnane, PhD, the Charles H. Gaut & Charles A. Norberg Assistant Professor of Engineering at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth; and Kaitlyn Ahlers, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and a child psychologist at Dartmouth Health.
The new COBRE-funded program builds on several key implementation science initiatives at Geisel over the last three years—including the Dartmouth Center for Implementation Science launched in 2022 and a new Master of Science (MS) in Implementation Science graduate degree program launched in 2025.
In addition, later this month Geisel will host its inaugural Dartmouth Implementation Science Symposium on September 24, 2025 in Hanover, NH.
“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,” Brown says.
Founded in 1797, the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth strives to improve the lives of the communities it serves through excellence in learning, discovery, and healing. The Geisel School of Medicine is renowned for its leadership in medical education, healthcare policy and delivery science, biomedical research, global health, and in creating innovations that improve lives worldwide. As one of America’s leading medical schools, Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine is committed to training new generations of diverse leaders who will help solve our most vexing challenges in healthcare.
