Page Former ACTSI KL2 Scholar Serves on American Academy of Pediatrics Committees

Makia E. Powers, MD, MPH, MSc, FAAP, assistant professor, Department of Pediatrics, Morehouse School of Medicine, was an ACTSI KL2-Mentored Clinical and Translational Research Scholar at Morehouse School of Medicine and is an ACTSI investigator supported by the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, & Research Design (BERD) program.

In 2015, Powers was selected to be a member on the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Adolescence and the AAP Subcommittee on Hypertension. She is currently serving a six-year term on both committees.

In her role on the Committee on Adolescence, her duties are to help write policy statements, clinical reports, and technical reports related to adolescent health care. “While on the committee, we have published Sexuality Education for Children and Adolescents. Our transgender policy statement should be published in late fall 2017, and I am primary author on an adolescent parenthood clinical report that will be published in 2018,” said Powers.

While serving on the Subcommittee on Hypertension, they were tasked with rewriting The Fourth Report on the Diagnosis, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure in Children and Adolescents. “After many months of hard work, we recently learned that our new guidelines have been endorsed by the American College of Cardiology and are scheduled to be published in Pediatrics this fall,” said Powers. Her ACTSI-supported KL2 project was on hypertension awareness and perceptions among black college men.

The goal of the Atlanta Clinical & Translational Science Institute (ACTSI)’s KL2 program is to support career development of junior faculty (MD, PhD, or MD/PhD) from a wide variety of disciplines at the ACTSI partner institutions, Emory University (Emory), Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM), and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). The KL2 program provides opportunities for didactic and mentored research training for KL2 scholars with the goal for our scholars to become independently funded and successful clinical and translational research investigators.

Powers worked with MSM biostatisticians Fengxia Yan, MD and Junjun Xu, MD. A key goal of the BERD program is to provide value-added assistance to markedly improve the quality of the translational and clinical research of Emory, Georgia Tech, and MSM investigators. This is accomplished by having highly trained, service oriented BERD personnel from Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, MSM, and Georgia Tech/Emory’s Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering available to assist researchers in a timely manner. 

ACTSI is a city-wide partnership between Emory, MSM, and Georgia Tech and is one of a national consortium striving to improve the way biomedical research is conducted across the country. The consortium, funded through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) as one of the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards, shares a common vision to translate laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, engage communities in clinical research efforts, and train the next generation of clinical investigators.