Led by Drs. Walid Gellad (Associate Chief of Staff for Research) and Charles Dela Cruz (Deputy Associate Chief of Staff for Research), the research program at the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) offers many opportunities for collaboration with high-quality research infrastructure available to DOM faculty.

The research program, housed in the Research Office Building at the University Drive Campus, comprises 141 prinicpal investigators, including 53 from the Department of Medicine, occupying approximately 70,000 sq ft of dry and wet lab space and an animal research facility. Three Centers of Excellence—Geriatrics Research and Education Clinical Center (GRECC), Mental Illness Research and Education Clinical Center (MIRECC), Center for Health Equality Research and Promotion (CHERP—are housed in this building, as well as the Research Laboratories and the Clinical Trials Center (CTC). The fourth center of excellence, the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL), is housed off campus in Bakery Square and occupies 20,000 sq ft of office, laboratory, and fabrication space.

A total of 82 principal investigators and research personnel occupy the wet laboratories (~18,000 sq ft; ~8,000 sq ft animal lab facility). There are five Tissue Culture (TC) rooms per floor each fully equipped with TC hood, stacked incubators, refrigerators, centrifuge inverted scopes water baths. In addition, an EVOS XL cell imaging system and a Leica dissecting scope are available, along with three state-of-the-art confocal microscopes, an Aurora cell sorter, a Seahorse XF ProAnalyzer, and an Illumina NextSeq550. The Clinical Trial Center (CTC) is staffed with eight administrative personnel and coordinators with expertise in managing all regulatory matters for industry and VA-funded clinical trials.

VAPHS researchers receive funding from VA, NIH, Sponsored (Commercial), and DoD. The total VA research expenditures for FY2024 was over $20 million, including VA and non-VA funding sources.

Drs. Gellad and Dela Cruz are committed to expanding collaboration between DOM and VA Research with the goal of benefiting our Veterans. DOM faculty are encouraged to contact them to discuss how NIH, DOD, and VA funding can be leveraged to advance science and career development.