Pediatrics professor awarded NIH grant

May 17, 2017 — UC Irvine pediatrician Candice Taylor Lucas, MD, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant designed to promote career-development diversity in health-related research.

Taylor Lucas, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics, will conduct her research at the UC Irvine School of Medicine's Pediatric Exercise and Genomics Research Center (PERC), a unique center devoted to researching the link between exercise and health in children.

Her current research broadly addresses the health needs of low-income and minority communities. It seeks to identify norms for early-life physical activity and to evaluate associations between responsive parenting and play.

Since joining the UC Irvine faculty, Taylor Lucas has amassed a substantial record of teaching, community outreach and clinical interaction. She is the founding director of the Early Childhood Obesity Prevention Action Group of Orange County, an initiative whose collaborators include the Children and Families Commission of Orange County, the Orange County Health Care Agency and MOMS Orange County.

She also initiated a monthly weight-management clinic for children and adolescents that she directs at the UC Irvine Health family health centers in Santa Ana and Anaheim, and at Gottschalk Medical Plaza in Irvine.

Taylor Lucas' NIH research career development award, bestowed by the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical & Translational Science, was made possible through our National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and the Clinical Translational Science Award.