VAAAHS Announces 2021 and 2022 Roger J. Grekin Research Awards

The Roger J. Grekin Research Award is co-sponsored by the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System (VAAAHS) Research Service and the Veterans Education and Research Association of Michigan (VERAM).   The Grekin Award was established in 2016 to honor Roger Grekin, M.D., a distinguished leader, educator, physician-scientist, and the VAAAHS’s Associate Chief of Staff for Research (ACOS-R) for 35 years.  This award is intended to honor a VA researcher who has shown a commitment to the values that Dr. Grekin shared with us: a commitment to serve our nation’s Veterans through excellence in research, leadership, service, and mentoring.

Dr. Eve Kerr has been awarded the 2021 VAAAHS Roger J. Grekin Research Award.  Dr. Kerr is noted for her leadership and served as the Director of the VA Center for Clinical Management Research, an HSR&D Center of Innovation (COIN), from 2008 to 2019.   Currently Dr. Kerr serves as the Division Chief for General Medicine at the University of Michigan and remains active in VA research.  Dr. Kerr is internationally recognized for her research which has helped to develop innovative, clinically meaningful methods to assess and improve quality of care.  Recently, Dr. Kerr has been leading efforts to inform health systems in setting priorities for decreasing low-value services.  The goal of these efforts is to help VA deliver the safest, most appropriate care to our Veterans, by intensifying treatment when needed, but also decreasing services that are not needed. 

Dr. Nithya Ramnath has been awarded the 2022 VAAAHS Roger J. Grekin Research Award.  Dr. Ramnath has been an Attending Physician at the VAAAHS for the past 13 years and is currently the Section Chief of Oncology as well as the Director of Oncology Research at the VAAAHS.  Dr. Ramnath is known for her exemplary patient care as well as her dedication to teaching of residents and fellows.  As the Principal Investigator on multiple VA Merit Research Awards and the Program Director of the VAAAHS Lung Precision Oncology Program (LPOP), Dr. Ramnath has single-handedly improved access to lung cancer screening and precision oncology trials for Veterans with non-small cell lung cancer.  Furthermore, the infrastructure provided by the LPOP has the potential to generate resources for new areas of investigation and discovery.