Dinushika Mohottige, MD, MPH, fellow in the Division of Nephrology, is one of four recipients of the Duke Reach Equity 2020 Career Development Awards.
Targeting junior faculty, these two-year awards support mentored research projects focusing on the REACH Equity theme: addressing racial and ethnic disparities in health by developing and testing interventions that improve the quality of patient-centered care in the clinical encounter – a setting in which racial and ethnic disparities are well-documented. This group of awardees is the third cohort, and they will begin their time as REACH Equity scholars in July 2020.
Dr. Mohottige's project title is "Improving equity in access to kidney transplants among African Americans."
Her overall research aim is to improve racial equity in transplant access and increase the utilization of organs available for kidney transplant. Mohottige’s REACH Equity project will identify patient, provider, and system-level factors contributing to differences in African American’s kidney transplant access and guide development of a tailored, patient-centered intervention to improve patients’ transplant knowledge, support, and decision-making.
"The urgency of eliminating stark, longstanding racial disparities in kidney disease outcomes remains profound. I'm deeply grateful for this REACH Equity award and a stellar mentorship team, which afford me the opportunity to continue developing critical skills in patient-centered, racial-equity focused research," Mohottige said.
Mohottige will join the faculty of the Division of Nephrology as a medical instructor beginning July 1, 2020. She earned her medical degree and a MPH degree at UNC Chapel Hill and completed her internal medicine residency training at Duke, where she served as chief resident for Duke Regional Hospital and Ambulatory Medicine from 2017-18. After residency, Mohottige completed a fellowship in Nephrology at Duke.