Influencers have a growing impact on the gaming industry, according to a new paper from Avery Haviv, associate professor of marketing at the Simon Business School.

“Since 2016, the use of influencer strategies to sell products across categories has increased ten-fold to $16.4 billion. Today, more than 90% of firms report spending more than 10% of their marketing budgets on influencer marketing,” writes Haviv in the Dean’s Blog.

The paper, available on SSRN, looks at nearly 100,000 users and their purchases of more than 1,000 games. The researchers linked that data to “more than 78,000 videos from the top 3,000 gaming channels on YouTube to gain a comprehensive picture of how influencer marketing affects the video game industry as a whole.”

Read about the study’s five main findings.

(Unsplash photo by Glen Carrie)

Scientists in Rochester’s Department of Computer Science and at the Eastman Institute for Oral Health are developing a smartphone app that can detect tooth decay. A grant from the National Science Foundation brings their work closer to reality.

The grant, SMARTeeth – Smart Connected Oral Health Community: Using AI and Digital Technologies to Close the Gaps in Oral Health Disparity, allows the team to continue developing and testing of an infrastructure for serving low-income communities. The project combines artificial intelligence technology through smartphones with community engagement through interactive oral health community centers, mobile vans, and community health workers.

“Severe tooth decay—or early childhood caries—is one of the most common preventable diseases and is on the rise worldwide,” explains Jin Xiao, an associate professor at the Eastman Institute and one of the grant’s principal investigators.

Learn more about the app.

(Unsplash photo by National Cancer Institute)

The Medical Center is extending its participation in a national network of academic medical centers working to create the resources and scale necessary to conduct clinical trials for rare neurological diseases.

The new funding will focus on projects aimed to accelerate the study and approval of a growing wave of gene therapies that are already revolutionizing care, increase diversity in clinical trial participation, and train the next generation of clinical researchers. The new award will bring the Medical Center’s total federal funding for the program to $5.7 million.

The grant arrives as the field undergoes a transformation.

(Getty Images)

Funding from the National Institutes of Health will support the development of a course to build ethical awareness and competency among translational science researchers.

Competing ethical challenges can arise when translational science researchers are also clinicians working with patients. They must often balance their roles as researchers and caregivers for the patients in their clinics, as the two do not always have clear ethical compatibility.

“While we do well at offering guidance and training for fulfilling our ethical duties as clinicians and as researchers, we do not yet have good guidance on how to navigate both of those roles simultaneously,” says the project’s lead investigator Jon Herington, an assistant professor in the Department of Health, Humanities, and Bioethics at the Medical Center and in the Department of Philosophy on the River Campus.

Learn more about the ethical challenges in question.

Apply by Monday, September 18 at 5 p.m. 

Applications are now open for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s KL2 Career Development Award, which provides two years of support for early-career, multidisciplinary clinical and translational scientists. The program fosters the transition of KL2 scholars to independent careers as clinical and translational investigators. Learn more and apply.

Monday, September 18, 2–3:30 p.m. for Mac users
Tuesday, September 19, 2–3:30 p.m. for Windows users
Virtual

Are you getting the most out of Excel? The River Campus Libraries have put together beginner-friendly Excel workshops to teach you a wide array of Excel skills. Instructors will walk you through cleaning, exploring, and visualizing a dataset. The workshops are part of Data Bloom, a series of workshops designed to help you create attractive data visualizations. Students have a chance to submit a visualization to win our Data Bloom contest. Check out the full workshop schedule for details and to register.

Wednesday, September 20, noon–1 p.m.
Virtual

Single IRB review refers to the use of one institutional review board to oversee and approve the ethical and regulatory aspects of a multisite research study, instead of having each participating institution’s IRB conduct a separate review. This approach aims to reduce duplication of effort, increase efficiency, and ensure consistent review across all participating sites. The IRB Reliance Exchange (IREx) platform is a freely available web-based tool to help study teams manage the single IRB requirements and streamline communications.

Emily Serdoz of Vanderbilt University Medical Center will explain how the IREx platform can be key to efficient sIRB review for lead clinical study teams. She will detail the single IRB workflow using IREx, highlight new features, and share resources and lessons learned to minimize administrative burden, improve communication, and support an efficient single IRB review process. This presentation is aimed at lead study teams involved in multisite research projects using an academic single IRB. Learn more.