Daniella Meeker, PhD, of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, and her collaborators have been awarded an R61 grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health for the project "Beyond Today: Building a Federated Infrastructure for Lifespan Health and Disease Research." The award totals $1,408,224 over two years. Meeker is one of the Multiple Principal Investigators (MPIs) on the award, alongside Contact PI Helen Pushkarskaya, PhD, assistant professor in psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine; Amanda M. Dettmer, PhD, research scientist in Yale Child Study Center; and Elisabet Borsheim, PhD, professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Geriatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Beyond Today is a federated, next-generation "Repository-as-a-Service" (RaaS) infrastructure designed to link research volunteer registries and longitudinal datasets across institutions, timepoints, and data modalities. It integrates a Research Volunteer Registry supporting dynamic consent and longitudinal engagement with a Longitudinal Data Repository built on FAIR and TRUST principles, along with federated data management, graduated data governance, and a cloud-based analytic workbench with reusable pipelines and AI-ready tools.
The project will be implemented in two phases: a Phase I stage at Yale to develop and deploy a functional prototype tested by three research groups spanning early childhood to older adulthood. This will be followed by a Phase II stage expanding the infrastructure to Arkansas Children's Research Institute to validate cross-site federation and long-term scalability.