Image Caption: Casey Overby Taylor and Stephanie Hicks

Two Malone Center faculty members will receive 2023 Johns Hopkins Catalyst Awards.

Casey Overby Taylor and Stepahnie Hicks were among the thirty-seven faculty members selected across nine academic divisions of Johns Hopkins University.

The 2023 honorees—selected on the basis of their accomplishments to date, creativity and originality, and academic impact—will each receive a $75,000 grant to support their work over the next year. They also will have the opportunity to participate in mentoring sessions and events designed to connect these colleagues at similar stages in their careers.

The Catalyst Awards program was launched in early 2015, as was the Discovery Awards program for interdivisional collaborations. Together the two programs represent a $45 million university commitment to faculty-led research by university leadership along with the deans and directors of JHU’s divisions.

Overby Taylor’s research draws from biomedical informatics and the related field of biomedical data science to address the challenge of how to incorporate digital health technologies into clinical research and clinical practices, particularly for genomics. She also draws from comparative effectiveness research approaches, including experience with conceptualizing and measuring implementation outcomes, to study the use of clinical decision support as a strategy to improve the adoption of clinically actionable guidance.

Hicks is an expert in developing scalable computational methods and open-source software for biomedical data analysis, in particular single-cell and spatial transcriptomics genomics data, leading to an improved understanding of human health and disease.