September 5, 2025 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
Postdoctoral research fellows Shiba Bailey and Huixuan Li are the inaugural recipients of $5,000 grants awarded by a new program spearheaded by the Arnold School’s Office of Research. The new Postdoctoral Fellows Research Grant Program announced a call for proposals earlier this year with the goal of supporting scholars’ research programs.
“This inaugural grant program provides dedicated research funding for postdoctoral fellows in the Arnold School of Public Health,” says Daniela Friedman, associate dean for research and leadership development. “We want our postdocs to be fully engaged in the Arnold School research community, as they are often the ones leading the work and driving impact in the communities we serve. On behalf of the Office of Research and Research Advisory Council, I want to thank all those who submitted proposals and the mentors who guided them, and most of all congratulate our two inaugural awardees, Shiba and Huixuan.”
A 2023 graduate of the Arnold School’s Ph.D. in Health Services Policy and Management program, Bailey is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the BRIE Lab, which is led by health promotion, education, and behavior professor and interim chair Brie Turner-McGrievy and aims to reduce the burden of diet-related chronic diseases using technology and culturally-tailored interventions. For her project, Bailey will explore ways to integrate nutrition behavior change alongside GLP-1 therapy to better support the rapidly growing population of Americans using these new drugs.
“The emergence of GLP-1 medications has transformed our toolbox for addressing obesity, which continues to affect 42 percent of U.S. adults, but weight loss, improved glycemic control, reduced cardiovascular risk and other health benefits are likely to be short-lived if we don’t complement these drugs with the adoption of healthy behaviors,” says Bailey, who has a background in pharmaceuticals studies. “This grant has provided an important opportunity to begin that work and to strengthen my application for a larger postdoctoral fellowship with the American Diabetes Association, which will help expand the reach and impact of this research.”
A postdoctoral fellow working with epidemiology associate professor Melissa Nolan, Li applies the remote sending and geospatial technologies expertise she developed in USC’s Ph.D. in Geography program to the infectious disease (particularly vector-borne and zoonotic illnesses) research conducted in the Nolan Lab. This grant will help Li extend her working looking at the impacts of climate change and land use transitions on the spatial dynamics of dengue fever in Mexico.
“My research sits at the intersection of geospatial sciences and public health, aiming to build early-warning systems for mosquito-borne disease outbreaks,” says Li, who sees this work as a combination of climate-health analytics and translational spatial epidemiology. “This grant allows me to lead an independent, data-intensive project that will inform future public health preparedness efforts in climate-vulnerable regions. Long-term, I hope to develop scalable predictive tools that can be applied across the Americas to support regional climate adaptation and disease surveillance.”
Stay tuned for next call for proposals, which will be announced in Spring 2026.