Organization & Leadership
Scientific Themes and Projects
The science conducted within the KIDDRC has traditionally fallen into four long-standing themes:
The University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan.
Dole Human Development Center in Lawrence, Kan.
Juniper Gardens Children's Project is located in the Children's Campus of Kansas City, Kan.
Core Services
Research will be facilitated through four core services provided at the KIDDRC: Administrative and Communications, Clinical Translational, Preclinical Models, and Research Design and Analysis.
Administrative and Communications Core
The KIDDRC operates across three physical locations: The KU Medical Center in Kansas City, the Dole Human Development Center on the KU campus in Lawrence and the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project at the Children’s Campus of Kansas City.
The Administration and Communications Core service coordinates and integrates services and functions across sites and provides scientific leadership to ensure that services are responsive to changing needs and new scientific directions within the Center.
In addition, this Core is charged with communicating the results of the research of the KIDDRC so that they may be quickly translated into practice. This includes students training for future careers in IDD, those individuals who serve individuals with IDD through clinical practice or service, and of course individuals with IDD and their family members.
Learn more about Administrative and Communications Core.
Clinical Translational Core
This Core addresses two basic problems faced by all researchers in the field of IDD: recruiting individuals to participate in research projects and accurately verifying diagnosis of individuals with IDD who are involved in research.
First, all scientists conducting clinical studies of IDD are challenged with recruiting individuals to their research projects. Some forms of IDD are fairly rare; for example, Fragile X syndrome affects only 1 in 2,500-4,000 males and 1 in 7,000-8,000 females. The services provided by this Core assists scientists in finding these individuals across the state, region, and country.
This Core facilitates contact with individuals with IDD for research by maintaining integrated repositories and other regional databases, by maintaining and expanding registries for access to populations of individuals with well-characterized IDD and typically-developing (TD) individuals, and by facilitating contact with community organizations and facilities that serve populations of interest to projects in the KIDDRC portfolio. Along with assisting scientists in recruiting individuals with IDD to their studies, the Core helps them compose valid comparison (control) groups that are necessary to draw reliable conclusions about their research.
In addition, individuals with the same IDD diagnosis can be quite different from one another in a number of ways, and these differences bear on the degree to which a scientist’s research can be generalized to broader IDD populations. Thus, it is important for researchers to carefully verify IDD diagnoses and measure individual variation in their populations.
This Core provides centralized assistance to investigators so that the methods for characterizing their samples are standardized and rigorous; this service also makes such tools cost-effective so that investigators do not need to duplicate such services in each laboratory or in each project. Standardizing these characterizations allows data from KIDDRC studies to be pooled with studies from other locations across the world so that the impact of our work can be accelerated and more broadly applied.
Learn more about Clinical Translational Core.
Preclinical Models Core
Much of what we understand about IDD and many of the treatments or interventions start with the genetic or behavioral modeling of IDD conditions in the laboratory at the molecular or cellular levels or with animals models. Since this work must occur before the actual clinical studies and trials of people with IDD, it is called Preclinical research.
This Core unit will assist scientists with the development of cellular and animal models of IDD by providing Center scientists with access to equipment, facilities, space, and trained personnel to create and characterize laboratory models of IDD and to analyze behavior, anatomy, physiology and gene expression using rigorous and state-of-the-art methods.
Learn more about Preclinical Models Core.
Research Design and Analysis Core
A common and critical function in the conduct of any scientific endeavor is the proper design of studies, and the appropriate analysis of the data derived from those designs. This Core will provide consultation and assistance to preclinical and clinical Center investigators in the design of laboratory experiments and field studies, with the construction of databases to safely and securely store large amounts of data, and with state-of-the-art statistical analysis and bioinformatics methods.
Learn more about Research Design and Analysis Core.
