The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded grants to two UC San Francisco researchers to pursue innovative approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research, one of them is the Greek researcher, Eleni Linos. The highly competitive grants, which were announced Oct. 5 among 86 such awards nationwide, were made under the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program supported by the NIH Common Fund.

“I continually point to this program as an example of the creative and revolutionary research NIH supports,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD. “The quality of the investigators and the impact their research has on the biomedical field is extraordinary.”

The New Innovator Award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency. Eleni Linos, MD, DrPH, is a leader in the field of skin cancer prevention, and uses her joint training in dermatology and public health to better understand the causes of skin cancer and to develop data-driven approaches to prevention.

Linos received the New Innovator Award for a pioneering effort to rigorously develop an online public health campaign to educate youth about the dangers of tanning beds, which are thought to cause over 460,000 new cases of skin cancer each year, but remain in common use among adolescents and young adults. The team aims to study the most effective messaging and modes of delivery via social media and other online platforms in order to reach young people and alter their behavior, culminating in a national campaign aimed at reaching over a million young Americans – one of the largest rigorous online public health efforts to date.

Linos and her team hope not only to directly reduce dangerous use of tanning beds among young people, but also to develop generalizable new approaches that can be applied to other diseases and public health efforts worldwide. Linos is an associate professor of dermatology and member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.