Cristina Espinosa-Diez, Ph.D., assistant professor of Physiology and of the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, received the Stephanie Watts Career Development Award from the American Heart Association’s Hypertension Council Conference.

The award, the agency said, supports early career investigators working in hypertension and cardiovascular research who show exceptional promise but may be currently unfunded or have limited access to extramural funding.

“Getting the award is a great recognition for me, first because it is named after Dr. Stephanie Watts, a scientist that I highly respect for her fantastic research and mentoring style. I hope I can be as good a scientist and mentor as she is further in my career. Also, as a new investigator in the field of hypertension and kidney disease, this is a great support and a relief to know that my peers find this proposal interesting and needed,” Dr. Espinosa-Diez said.

A subcommittee nominated by the Council on Hypertension Training Advocacy Committee selects up to three finalists for the award, who each give three-minute presentations at the Hypertension Scientific Sessions, where judges determine the winner based on the criteria, application documents, scientific merit and quality of the presentation.

The winner receives an engraved plaque, a complimentary ticket to the Council on Hypertension Awards banquet and a complete Data Sciences International telemetry system that will allow Dr. Espinosa-Diez to optimize a preclinical model of cancer-therapy-induced hypertension in a long-non-coding-RNA animal model.

The work will be helpful in generating preliminary data for a future R01 grant application, through which she will test different models of cancer therapeutics, including radiotherapy, cisplatin and VEGF inhibitors that have been previously connected to increased development of hypertension.

“Receiving this equipment is a great boost for my independence as I will be able to perform these experiments in the laboratory, which otherwise will be very hard to optimize through collaborations,” Dr. Espinosa-Diez said.

The award honors the advocacy work of Dr. Stephanie Watts, a former member of the Council on Hypertension who has advocated for the needs of trainees associated with the council. The works of Dr. Watts led to the creation of the Trainee Advocacy Committee, which she chaired from 2005 to 2007. As a founding member of the TAC, she contributed to the planning of the Hypertension Summer School, another important Council on Hypertension past initiative that helped many trainees to become highly skilled hypertension researchers.

Dr. Espinosa-Diez’s research focuses on non-coding-RNA and in understanding how cancer therapies shape the epigenetic landscape of vascular cells, potentially giving rise to long-term vascular complications. Her lab’s main goals are to explore the response of long-non-coding RNAs to different anti-cancer agents and investigating these long-non-coding RNAs’ role in vascular remodeling during disease progression.