GHUCCTS: A Home for Translational Research at Georgetown

This article is one of a series this spring about GHUCCTS

(April 10, 2026) — As a fellow in endocrinology and metabolism at the University of Pittsburgh, Joseph G. Verbalis, MD, viewed the clinical research unit as “the home for people who were interested in doing clinical and translational research.”

His clinical and translational research experiences in Pittsburgh laid the groundwork for his leadership of the Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (GHUCCTS). Since 2010, GHUCCTS has been funded by a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

GHUCCTS supports researchers by providing the resources they need to be successful, including assistance with research design, statistics, regulatory issues, health informatics, participant recruitment, and community engagement. It essentially serves as the “home” for investigators and trainees interested in doing clinical and translational research, geographically distributed across its partner institutions.

“If you look at any aspect of clinical research, investigators often need some help to overcome barriers in order to start their study, or to organize a multisite study,” Verbalis said. “And that’s a large part of what GHUCCTS does. Importantly, CTSAs are disease-agnostic by design, meaning that we provide support for investigators regardless of their scientific or medical area of study.”

Identifying Local Partners

CTSAs were created by the NIH in 2006 to expedite the process of translating scientific knowledge into useful therapies for patients. According to the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), there are currently 66 CTSA program hubs, including the one here at Georgetown. Georgetown is one of a few dozen medical centers in the country to hold both a CTSA and a Cancer Center Support Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

“Translational science is what the word implies — it translates findings in basic science and other areas of investigation into clinically useful treatment strategies,” Verbalis said. “The CTSAs are meant to provide the infrastructure for centers of excellence in clinical and translational research across the country.”

After the NIH announced the creation of CTSAs, Verbalis and colleagues from Georgetown and MedStar Health Research Institute received an exploratory grant to develop the CTSA application. The exploratory grant helped identify partners for the CTSA: Howard University, the Washington, D.C. VA Medical Center and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Including partners with different areas of excellence and different clinical populations allowed GHUCCTS to expand the scope of resources available for investigators and trainees across each of its partner institutions.

As the name suggests, GHUCCTS represents a true partnership between Georgetown and Howard University. “Georgetown and Howard are the two main university partners,” Verbalis said. “Since GHUCCTS is funded as a multi-PI grant, it’s not a program where Georgetown alone is the primary institution.”

“The strength of GHUCCTS lies in its ability to bridge different types of institutions, disciplines and communities,” said Marjorie C. Gondré-Lewis, PhD, GHUCCTS co-director and associate dean for faculty development and justice, diversity, equity and inclusion at Howard University College of Medicine. “Both institutions have benefited from expanded research opportunities, cross-institutional mentorship and a richer, more diverse scientific environment that would not exist without this partnership.”

“The combination of two major universities, including an historically Black university, as co-equal partners in a CTSA makes us unique,” Verbalis added. “Our CTSA from the start was established as a shared partnership, so we act as a model for multi-institutional collaborations and governance.”

Collaborating with MedStar Health

In addition to Howard University, MedStar Health has also played a pivotal role in the success of GHUCCTS.

“MedStar Health is our academic partner and together, we have created an academic health system that bridges academic and real-world medicine across 400 sites of care in the mid-Atlantic. This means we have one of the biggest clinical research networks in the country,” Verbalis said. “But the value of MedStar as a partner is not only providing the patient populations that are needed to do effective clinical research. They have provided experts across several domains and lead areas of bioinformatics, implementation science and professional development.”

Through GHUCCTS, MedStar Health, Georgetown and Howard University have worked together to become a data science powerhouse. GHUCCTS’ Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) component provides high-quality methodological support and training for researchers. In 2021, MedStar Health and Georgetown announced their collaboration in the Data Science Training Core, part of the NIH Artificial Intelligence-Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) program.

This multi-institutional infrastructure also allows the GHUCCTS to remain nimble with fast moving advances in health care. For example, an upcoming project for GHUCCTS will capitalize on its expertise in data science by using AI to identify risk factors for adverse events in pregnancy and postpartum, building off of MedStar Health’s Safe Babies, Safe Moms initiative.

“Once an obstetrician knows there’s a risk factor that maybe they hadn’t recognized, it will allow that patient to receive more targeted evaluations and potential interventions,” Verbalis said. “We couldn’t do that without participation of MedStar Health Research Institute, including access to the clinical platform, so that when we have identified and verified risk factors, they can be included in the electronic health record to identify patients at risk for an adverse outcome.”

Training Researchers in Team Science

Training early career scientists to work in translational science is one of the goals of CTSAs and one of GHUCCTS’ strengths. “Of the approximately 22 investigators for whom we have provided three years of support for, almost half of those have stayed on at Georgetown as faculty members,” Verbalis said. “To me, that represents an outstanding accomplishment for a small university: training young investigators how to perform high-quality clinical and translational research that then enables them to establish careers as research scientists.”

“It takes a team to really speed up the translation of your scientific discovery,” said Kathryn Sandberg, PhD, director of the training program in Translational Biomedical Science for predoctoral students and postdoctoral fellows at GHUCCTS. “We’re teaching them how to lead teams, be a team player and engage teams, because to really make progress in complex problems, you really need a team approach.”

GHUCCTS is also striving to improve training for members of the research support staff, including data managers and research coordinators. “Clinical research is a team sport, where people play lots of roles,” said Jason Umans, MD, PhD, director of mentored career and translational workforce development at GHUCCTS. “There is now the recognition that we should be doing more for every member of our clinical and translational research teams.”

“I’ve been co-directing our CTSA for the last 15 years because I’m committed to the importance of clinical and translational research and providing support to investigators, particularly young investigators, to ensure that we have well-trained teams who represent the future of clinical and translational research,” Verbalis said. “That’s essential if we are to accelerate progress in improving the health of all of our populations, which has always been our primary goal.”

Kat Zambon
GUMC Communications