Faculty Innovation Fellowship Sparks Research Collaboration

Faculty Innovation Fellowship Sparks Research Collaboration

By Eric Breier

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Deborah Feairheller and Justin Morris first met as part of the same new faculty training cohort when they arrived at Cal State San Marcos in 2022.

Though part of different colleges - Feairheller a kinesiology professor in the College of Education, Health and Human Services and Morris a computer engineering professor in the College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics - they reconnected as members of the second cohort of Faculty Innovation Fellows in CSUSM's Innovation Hub. The program fosters innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities for students, faculty, and community and industry partners.

While Feairheller and Morris were working on separate projects during the fellowship, their connection led to a new collaboration that has earned federal funding to advance their research.

The project, "AI-Driven Models for Disease Detection in Cardiovascular Health," was awarded a grant through the National Institutes of Health's AIM-AHEAD Program for Artificial Intelligence Readiness (PAIR), which supports multidisciplinary teams focused on building capacity for AI/ML health equity research. Joining Feairheller and Morris on the project are computer science professors Ali Ahmadinia and Sreedevi Gutta.

"By getting the award from AIM-AHEAD, we now have data available to us that we previously didn't have," Morris said. "That can be another resource for us to improve our models and better understand what additional data we'll need when we do go to collect new information with Deb."

Feairheller credited the innovation fellowship for providing the space to initiate those early discussions, which grew into a broader collaboration.

"I'm really excited that we have access to this extra data," Feairheller said. "Through this grant program, they're going to help us in creating a project proposal that will build on the idea that they have and also help enable future research in cardiovascular health and women."

Before joining CSUSM, Feairheller was at the University of New Hampshire where she focused on understudied populations affected by cardiovascular disease. Coming to CSUSM, she recognized the need for specific research in women. She is eager to use the AI modeling that Morris and his team will be doing to improve screening tools that could be used in her clinic to potentially enable more patients to be engaged in learning about their cardiovascular health.

Feairheller noted the importance of recognizing the difference in the hearts of men and women. She said there is limited published research on how a female heart responds to stressors, exercise and other activity.

"The clinical guidelines and the paradigms that physicians use to treat patients are following protocols that were derived on studies that were done primarily in men, so I really love that we're going to create these AI models," she said. "And I really do hope that we can do something that is specific for females as well as for males because it might create ways that we can do screening that's very sex specific and could potentially save lives."

The "AI-Driven Models for Disease Detection in Cardiovascular Health" project got jumpstarted with initial data that had already been collected by Feairheller in her previous research working with women, which Morris said allowed them to improve their grant proposal by creating models based on that data.

Both Feairheller and Morris emphasized the role the Faculty Innovation Fellows program played in bringing their collaboration to fruition, and they encourage other faculty to give the program a try.

"The fellowship really helped us learn about each other's research," Morris said, "and it facilitated impactful conversations."

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