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As we close out the year, when many of you will gather to spend time with friends and family, I want to express my gratitude to all of you for your remarkable accomplishments over what has been by any measure an incredibly challenging year. Despite this, I believe that we can look back and reflect on the ways in which as a department we rose to the challenges and supported each other to ensure that no one would stumble and be left behind. Your generosity and resilience give me hope that we are prepared to face new challenges in the coming year, whatever those may be. We are stronger when we stick together, lift each other up and focus on our core goals to Lead in Innovation, Transform Care and Advance Health for All. This week, I thought I would share two stories, one about me and another about you.

A Story of Serendipity: How Lunch in Lisbon Led to an ERC Grant

As we close out the year and look ahead to 2026, I would like to share with you a personal experience that I hope will inspire you as you to stay open to all possibilities as you undertake the challenging work of raising money to fund your science in the wake of cuts to federal funding. This story shows that collaboration can come from anywhere, and that chance connections can lead to high-impact research projects with significant financial backing.

During lunch one day, I sat next to Guadalupe Sabio, DVM, PhD, a researcher who studies the link between obesity and cancer at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO) in Madrid. As we learned about each other’s work, Dr. Sabio told me about a grant from the European Union’s European Research Council that is designed to bring together teams of three or four principal investigators with expertise from different fields to tackle important questions in science. She has made a novel observation that could inform how obesity could increase the risk of heart disease, and specifically heart failure. I was intrigued, as this is something that my lab has been studying for a long time. I told her I was interested in potentially working together on this project and on a grant application with her. We decided we would follow up after the symposium.

After I returned from Portugal, Dr. Sabio and I had a couple of meetings over Zoom to exchange ideas and flesh out what our collaboration could look like. We agreed to work together. Over the next three months, behind the scenes, she continued to recruit other investigators, ultimately bringing on board proteomics expert Jesper Velgaard Olsen, PhD of the University of Copenhagen and Mauro Giacca, MD, PhD, a professor of cardiovascular sciences at the King’s College London School of Cardiovascular Medicine & Sciences. We met a few more times over Zoom then sent off the initial portion of our application, or Part A.

I had never applied for any type of research funding from the European Union and was unfamiliar with the application process for this particular grant mechanism prior this opportunity. Let me explain a little bit about how it works. The initially application itself is divided into two sections, Part I and Part II. Part I of the application is an abbreviated proposal; if it is accepted, the review committee will request Part II, a much more comprehensive explanation of our project. If Part II is accepted, the team is invited for an interview to present their proposal in person before a panel in Brussels.

A few months after we submitted Part I, we were invited to submit Part II. I was pleasantly surprised; as many of you who have experienced the funding process know, it is healthy to have a sense of emotional detachment around grants. Dr. Sabio, Dr. Olsen, Dr. Giacca and I met a few more times over Zoom to polish things up and sent Part II on its way. I anticipated that we wouldn’t hear from the committee again.

Then, in mid-August of this year — nearly a year after we submitted Part I of our application — all three of us were summoned to Brussels to present our work. I say “summoned” rather than “invited” because, in order to progress through the next phase, we had to show up in person in Brussels to give our presentation. Only under extreme extenuating circumstances could any one of us miss this meeting, which was required to take place between Sept. 9 and Sept. 12. We would be given 10 minutes to present the project, then would take questions from the committee for another 35 minutes. We had no idea what they would ask — by this point, we had not received any feedback whatsoever on our proposal, even as we progressed through the application process. We came up with little hand signals to note which one of us would answer a question based on their expertise.

We booked our presentation time for Sept. 11 and got to work in August, developing the presentation and rehearsing over Zoom, working with a timer to ensure that we finished before the 10-minute mark. Dr. Sabio recruited scientist friends from Spain to conduct mock Q&As.

On Sept. 9, I left LAX for an overnight flight to Brussels. I arrived in the late afternoon on the Sept. 10, less than 24 hours before our presentation at 8 AM the next day. The night of the Sept. 10^th, I finally met Dr. Olsen in person for the very first time, as we rehearsed the talk in a room we had booked at our hotel. We agreed to rehearse for a few more hours the next morning when Dr. Giacca could be present, as his train from London would not arrive in Brussels until late that night.

The presentation took place at the EU headquarters in Brussels. We could not simply walk in; we had to get vetted and obtain security clearances ahead of time. There were four or five rooms occupied by judges and the other finalists in the course of their interviews. Our room was a large conference room with a long table going down the center. We stood at one end with a screen behind us and the review panel seated at the other side. 

The questions the review panel asked after our presentation were very tough, much like the ones one is asked when defending their thesis in graduate school. Despite how difficult the questions were, we thought our performance went okay. Afterwards, the three Europeans and I had coffee, then they headed back to their home countries.

I had one more afternoon to spend in Brussels before my 4 AM flight the next day, so I met up with a Brussels-based colleague and did a bit of shopping. I thought that if nothing else, I could at least come home with some Belgian chocolates.

Three weeks later we received an email informing us that the competition was very steep — but that they had not yet made their decisions. The next email was much more definitive: We did it! We would receive a European Research Council Synergy Grant valued at €10,176,526 ($11.7 million), with €2,118,750 ($2.4 million) budgeted for our portion of the work here at UCLA.

It was only after learning we would receive the grant that we were given feedback from our reviewers. Normally, for grants from the National Institutes of Health, there are three peer reviewers. In this case, there were 15 — and they had lots of notes. Apparently, we addressed their concerns well in the Q&A session. This is a welcome departure from the funding process we use stateside, which judges applications based on what is written without giving the researchers behind them the chance to defend their thoughts or clarify things. Out of 712 applicants, only 66 projects were chosen for funding. That is about a 9% success rate. Even more remarkable is the breadth of the proposals: They truly came from all realms of science, from astrophysics to environmental science to medicine and everything in between (I encourage you to check out the list of grant recipients for yourself).

Our project is titled “Adipohealth.” It seeks to illuminate and add nuance to the well-known relationship between obesity and heart failure with the goal of identifying biomarkers for heart failure risk and developing new treatments. We will build off of preliminary findings from Dr. Sabio’s lab that suggest that molecular changes in adipose tissue lead to the release of mediators from fat cells that circulate to the heart to sensitize it to heart failure. This approach diverges from the common assumption that heart failure in obesity and diabetes is a consequence of vascular dysfunction. Dr. Olsen’s lab will leverage sophisticated proteomics and other multi-omic screening approaches to identify exactly what genes and proteins are different in the fat cells and cardiac cells of people and animal models with obesity and heart failure. Depending on what we find, we will use Dr. Giacca’s expertise in cell-based screening and characterization and generation of nanoparticles to create highly targeted therapies. My lab and that of Dr. Sabio will bring expertise in animal models of metabolic dysfunction, diabetes and obesity to elucidate the mechanisms by which these novel mediators may cause heart failure in this context.

We hope that this research will have a meaningful impact in advancing our understanding of the cardiometabolic effects of obesity and will lay the groundwork for significant advances in patient care. For all of you, I would like to reiterate that this is truly a story of serendipity — and that there are opportunities for similar stories to emerge from every networking event or scientific meeting you attend. There is real value in being open to working with others to find opportunities to put your best ideas out there, and this is an example of how such ideas came together across the ocean to make us very competitive for funding.

The uncertainty around federal funding here in the U.S. means that we will need to continue to think about alternative and additional mechanisms to support our important work. Taking a global approach may contribute to keeping our research going strong here in department of medicine especially when we cannot rely upon the agencies that previously bolstered our work. I encourage all of you to continue to look to your broader network, both within UCLA and beyond, for collaborative opportunities that bring together diverse perspectives and skillsets. These, in my opinion, are ultimately better for science anyway.

Winter Wellness Gatherings Celebrate a Year of Camaraderie

The second story is about you. The strength of our community shone brightly in the past few weeks, in the face of this year’s many challenges. From coming together to help your colleagues who were forced to evacuate their homes in the L.A. fires, to offering a safe space to vent during the chaos of federal cuts to research budgets, to the small but meaningful ways in which you help each other every day in the course of your work, you all have proven that community is the key to resilience.

To show our appreciation for all of your outstanding work this year, we lobbied the University to grant us permission to host small, informal gatherings around the department this past month, to honor an appreciate our community members. Many of you attended these gatherings to celebrated your dedication to our missions — and to each other. Thank you! Happy Holidays! Get some rest if you can, as we return in the New Year to take one whatever challenges we may face.

Dale

P.S.

It was foggy when I went left my home on Saturday morning for my 15K run. In the mist I noticed the car of the youngest person in the neighborhood to get their driver’s license.

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