Aim-Ahead
The AIM AHEAD Leadership Core Southeast Hub at Meharry Medical College serves 11 U.S. states: Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. It includes a broad network of institutions and partners, including 93 minority-serving institutions (MSIs), 141 community organizations, 38 industry partners, and 1,438 healthcare providers in the region. The Hub leadership is committed to bringing these partners into the AIM-AHEAD consortium to build an inspiring example of how the future of global health innovation should look.
Meharry is the only HBCU participating in national clinical trials such as PCORI, IGNITE, and eMERGE, which aim to address data gaps in health-related challenges.
The responsible development and optimized use of AI is crucial for expanding the AI technology benefits to all populations including those from low socio-economic groups. The activities supported by the AIM-AHEAD program ensure that healthcare innovation effectively supports all communities.
The Southeast Hub at Meharry is focused on:
- Overcoming AI hesitancy through community partnerships and implementation strategies;
- Building community capacity and competitiveness in AI/ML; and
- Fostering innovative AI/ML research in behavioral health, cardiometabolic health and cancer.
Thus, we engage community stakeholders to foster innovative AI/ML-health research, including funding hub-specific pilot projects, AI training through various fellowships, and AI capacity building through infrastructure support and public-private partnerships.
Meharry also hosts the Regulatory Compliance Office (RCO) of the NIH AIM-AHEAD Program. The RCO guides and educates researchers and institutions on IRBs, DUAs, and data privacy, preparing them for future AI research.
Key Activities
- Engage with communities to gather insights through webinars, listening sessions, and surveys to better understand pressing healthcare and research needs.
- Identify AI/ML and healthcare gaps based on input from individuals, communities, and institutions, and facilitate connections with AIM-AHEAD partners.
- Build and coordinate a consortium of institutions and organizations with a mission to address unmet needs in healthcare research and technology implementation.
- Promote collaboration across regional hubs and technical cores—including the Data Science Training Core, Data Research Core, and Infrastructure Core—to support workforce and data ecosystem development.
- Design and implement pilot projects specific to the Southeast Hub.
- Coordinate research and professional development initiatives such as the Program for Artificial Intelligence Readiness (PAIR), Data and Infrastructure Capacity Building (DICB), and consortium-based collaborations.
- Develop evaluation mechanisms to assess the success and impact of hub activities, including formal program evaluation plans. Monitor project deliverables and sub-awards across consortium institutions to ensure progress on training, pilot studies, and collaborative research.
AIM-AHEAD Team
Anil Shanker, M.S., Ph.D.
Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation
Professor
Interim Director, Center for Women’s Health Research
ashanker@mmc.edu
Smruti Mohanty
Director, NIH AIM AHEAD Leadership Core Southeast Hub Management
The Office for Research and Innovation
smohanty@mmc.edu
Rajbir Singh, MBBS
Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine
Co- Director, Center for Women’s Health Research
Executive Director, Center of Excellence for Clinical and Translational Research
Executive Director, Precision Medicine and Health Trials Design
Director, Regulatory Compliance Office, NIH AIM-AHEAD Consortium
Co-Director, Center for Women’s Health Research
Co-Investigator, NIH AIM-AHEAD Leadership Core Southeast Hub
Chair, Institutional Review Board (IRB), Meharry Medical College
rsingh@mmc.edu
Qingguo Wang, Ph.D.
Professor of Data Science
Director of Genomics Data Core
Co-Investigator, NIH AIM-AHEAD Leadership Core Southeast Hub