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SPH Selects Winners of Dean’s Innovation Challenge

Four teams of BU faculty, staff, and students plan to tackle a range of creative projects, including mitigating misinformation around weight loss supplements, monitoring public health emergencies, detecting tuberculosis in low-resource settings, and preventing drug overdoses among adolescents.

Four teams of BU faculty, staff, and students have been awarded $10,000 each as winners of the 2025 Dean’s Innovation Challenge, Interim Dean Michael Stein announced to the SPH community on March 3.

Dean Stein launched the competition on January 2, writing in his first message as dean, “In 2025, the world needs the best work of public health more than ever […] We find ourselves at an extraordinary moment of challenge and opportunity.” Hoping to seize the moment and sustain the School’s upward trajectory under former Dean Sandro Galea, Stein says he conceived the challenge as an opportunity to both encourage novel collaborations across the school and highlight to the world the energy and creativity of SPH’s faculty, staff, and students.

The winning teams will tackle a range of short-term projects: mitigating misinformation around weight loss supplements, monitoring public health emergencies, detecting tuberculosis in low-resource settings, and preventing drug overdoses among adolescents.

“Announcing these winners, who represent forward thinking at a time when so much in our world feels paused, is a delight for me,” says Stein, who reviewed applications from 19 teams alongside a committee consisting of members from the faculty, staff, and student senates.

Each team submitted a one-page summary of their project, which could either be an offshoot of existing work or a novel idea. Summaries outlined the team’s proposed activities, the anticipated benefits, a vision for disseminating findings, and a brief budget. The proposals were subsequently reviewed by one faculty, one staff, and one student member of the committee according to a standardized rubric and scored based on points awarded across five categories: purpose (40%), innovation and creativity (30%), anticipated benefits and real-world impact (15%), feasibility and budget justification (10%), and collaboration and team composition (5%). In accordance with the grant review format used at the National Institutes of Health, the entire committee then discussed the application, revised initial scores, and passed on the anonymized results to Stein for final review of the committee’s comments and rankings.

Upon conclusion of the six-month award period, the team whose project has received the most visibility outside the University will be recognized with a prize of $5,000 to be divided equally among the members.

Mitigating Misinformation Around Weight Loss Supplements

Monica Wang, associate professor of community health sciences; Matthew Motta, assistant professor of health law, policy and management; Selenne Alatorre, senior research project manager; and Willa Rose, an MPH student, plan to expand upon their prior research at the intersection of mental health and social media. Their project, titled “Disrupting Weight Loss Supplement Misinformation: An Influencer-Led Intervention,” will leverage popular content creators to increase the quantity and accuracy of information on the risks associated with the largely unregulated, multi-billion dollar weight loss supplement industry.

“I couldn’t be more excited to be part of one of the four award-winning teams,” wrote Alatorre in a LinkedIn post celebrating her team’s achievement. “As social media continues to play a significant role in how individuals access health information, our team aims to address and combat misinformation in this space. This challenge was designed to foster creative, collaborative projects, and our team is ready and excited to contribute to a meaningful solution!”

Monitoring Public Health Emergencies

Huimin Cheng, assistant professor of biostatistics, and Vedika Srivastava, a research scientist in the Department of Biostatistics, intend to use their award to develop a new digital platform that integrates multiple public data sources to enhance early detection and response to emerging health threats. Their project, titled “Real-Time Data-Driven Early Warning System for Public Health Emergencies,” will scrape geotagged social media posts, social networks, online news, Google search trends, and open-source government data such as air- and water-quality indices and meteoritical data to enable identification of concerning developments. The technology they hope to build could prove invaluable in mitigating the effects of future pandemics, note Cheng and Srivastava. Information leading to timely warnings and interventions during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, may have saved lives.

Detecting Tuberculosis in Low-Resource Settings

Meredith Brooks, assistant professor of global health; Leonardo Martinez, assistant professor of epidemiology; Jiujia Zhang, a PhD student in electrical engineering at BU; and Lauren Linde, a PhD student in epidemiology at SPH, teamed up to co-design a web-based application that healthcare staff in under-resourced communities heavily affected by tuberculosis (TB) can use to increase efficiency of mobile screening programs. The project, titled “Co-designing an App to Increase the Efficiency of Mobile Screening Programs for Tuberculosis” (CAMP-TB), draws on evidence gathered from their prior research in Lima, Peru, which showed that data-driven models like the one they propose could increase TB detection rates five-fold by optimizing placement of mobile x-ray units used to diagnose the disease.

Preventing Drug Overdoses Among Adolescents

Debbie Cheng, assistant dean of data science and professor of biostatistics; Kimberly Nelson, associate professor of community health sciences; Nina Cesare, research scientist at BEDAC; Sarah Bagley, associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine; Amy Yule, associate professor of psychiatry at Chobanian & Avedisian SOM; and Christina Freibott, a PhD student in health services and policy research at SPH, aim to harness the power of peer education to reduce risk-taking behavior among adolescents. The team will collaborate with students from O’Bryant High School, a Boston public school in Roxbury, to execute the project, titled “Development of a Peer Overdose Intervention and Training Program for High School Students: An Equity-Centered Approach.”

Over the course of 10 in-person sessions, the researchers and students will co-develop an inclusive, culturally sensitive curriculum for educating high school students on risk factors for drug overdose. After training youth leaders to administer the curriculum to their peers, the researchers and their student collaborators will then co-create and apply a novel tool for gauging age-appropriate measures of overdose knowledge and drug-related risk behaviors. If the program proves effective, they hope to make the training guidelines available online for use by other schools and in future research.