Grants We Funded
Grant applicants for the 2023 cycle requested a total of nearly $4 million dollars. The PSF Study Section Subcommittees of Basic & Translational Research and Clinical Research evaluated nearly 140 grant applications on the following topics:
The PSF awarded research grants totaling over $1 million dollars to support nearly 30 plastic surgery research proposals.
ASPS/PSF leadership is committed to continuing to provide high levels of investigator-initiated research support to ensure that plastic surgeons have the needed research resources to be pioneers and innovators in advancing the practice of medicine.
Research Abstracts
Search The PSF database to have easy access to full-text grant abstracts from past PSF-funded research projects 2003 to present. All abstracts are the work of the Principal Investigators and were retrieved from their PSF grant applications. Several different filters may be applied to locate abstracts specific to a particular focus area or PSF funding mechanism.
Surgical Biomaterials as Substrates For Biofilm Formation
Eric Chien-Wei Liao MD, PhD
2007
Harvard Medical School
Basic Research Grant
Tissue Engineering
We intend to evaluate Staphylococcus aureus adhesion and biofilm formation on both synthetic and biologically-derived surgical mesh materials. We hypothesize that S. aureus will adhere more readily to acellular dermal matrix than to synthetic materials. There might also be differences in S. aureus' propensity to adhere to various acellular dermal matrix preparations. Furthermore, we will determine if different substrate material differentially activate S. aureus virulence and biofilm factors. We hypothesize that different subsets of S. aureus genes might be activated upon contact with biotic versus abiotic surfaces and will employ transcriptional profiling to examine this possibility.
Eric C. Liao, M.D., Ph.D. is an Assistant in Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Shriners Hospital for Children. His clinical interests are in microsurgery reconstruction and pediatric plastic surgery. Dr. Liao is the principal investigator of the craniofacial laboratory with research focused on cleft lip and palate malformation
utilizing innovative genetic approaches. His work is funded by several prestigious awards, including the American Surgical Association Research Fellowship, the Basil O’Connor Start Scholar Award from the March of Dimes, and current and past awards from the Plastic Surgery Education Foundation.