The NIH MERIT (R37) is a prestigious award designed to provide stable, long-term funding support to outstanding, experienced investigators whose productivity is distinctly superior and who are deemed highly likely to continue to perform their research activities in an outstanding manner.
Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health
Hailey Banack, PhD, is a research assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health where she works on the large-scale, long-term research study, the Women’s Health Initiative. An epidemiologist with expertise in women’s health, Banack focuses her research broadly on obesity and aging. She is also interested in using quantitative bias analysis techniques to investigate and account for sources of bias in aging research. A former postdoctoral associate at UB, in 2017, Banack was UB’s first recipient of a Banting Fellowship, Canada’s most prestigious award for postdoctoral researchers. In 2023, Banack received a MERIT Award (R37) from the National Cancer Institute to support her her work in developing an accurate and scalable approach to measuring muscle mass in postmenopausal cancer survivors.