The recipient of the 2022 Dr. Suzanne Kneuper Linder Research Award for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research is 3rd-year medical student Warona Mathuba.

Her research mentor, Dr. Brian Downer, wrote the following:

“Warona has an exceptional ability to use her clinical experiences as a medical student to inform her research. This is exemplified by her Summer Research Program project in which we used a national sample of over 400,000 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries to study racial and ethnic disparities in improvement in daily activities during a skilled nursing facility (SNF) stay. Warona’s medical training was valuable in describing the clinical meaningfulness of our findings that Black SNF residents discharged from the hospital for a hip fracture or stroke, but not joint replacement had significantly lower odds for any improvement in activities of daily living during a SNF stay than White residents. Warona wrote a first-author manuscript based on these findings that was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, which is a leading medical journal in Gerontology and Geriatrics. She also presented these findings as a poster at the 2021 Winter Series on Aging, which received first prize in the student category for Disparities in Physical Function. These highly impressive accomplishments are a testament to her abilities as a researcher and scholar.”

The Dr. Suzanne Kneuper Linder Research Award Fund is a permanent endowment in the School of Health Professions, established in memory of Dr. Suzanne Linder, former Edna Seinsheimer Levin Endowed Professor in Cancer Studies and Assistant Professor in the former Division of Rehabilitation Sciences. Funds distributed from the endowment shall be used to give an award to a Fellow and/or Student and/or other Trainee working in patient-centered research. The awardee is selected by the Director of the Sealy Center on Aging in consultation with the Dean of the School of Health Professions.