Prestigious early career author prize for CONHI alumnus
A kinesiology alumnus from The University of Texas at Arlington has won Experimental Physiology’s prestigious Early Career Author Prize for 2020-21 for his research on blood pressure regulation in Black men.
Ben Young graduated in 2020 with his doctorate in kinesiology. He won the award for his paper “Augmented resting beat-to-beat blood pressure variability in young, healthy, non-Hispanic black men,” based on research conducted in the Human Neural Cardiovascular Control Lab at UTA led by Paul Fadel, associate dean for research and professor of kinesiology.
“I think this award exemplifies the quality of work conducted not only in Dr. Fadel’s lab, but across the entirety of the College of Nursing and Health Innovation (CONHI) at UTA,” said Young, who has started a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Applied Clinical Research at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Young’s research focuses on neural control of the circulation and metabolic organs in human health and disease, with a particular emphasis on populations with a greater propensity for the future development of cardiovascular disease, including Black men.
“We study the regulation of the sympathetic nervous system to better understand the autonomic dysregulation that is present in individuals at risk for the development of cardiovascular disease,” Fadel said. “Ben has been a major contributor to these research efforts over the past few years.”
During his time at UTA, Young also received an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship and several research awards from the American Physiological Society. While Young’s dissertation focused on type 2 diabetes, the article that won acclaim was related to research on blood pressure regulation in Black men. This topic is one component in a series of collaborative studies funded by the National Institutes of Health and led by Fadel and David Keller, professor of kinesiology and a CONHI associate dean.
While the prevalence of hypertension in Black individuals is widely known, the underlying factors remain incompletely understood. Most notable about Young’s research was that it quantified a greater heartbeat-by-heartbeat variability in blood pressure in young healthy Black men.
“What was interesting was that the Black men exhibited a greater number of their cardiac cycles on not only the high end, but also the low end of their blood pressure distributions,” Young said. “We took this to suggest that Black men may be experiencing greater oscillations in blood pressure over time.”
The Experimental Physiology Early Career Author Prize was established in 2009 to reward early career authors who publish outstanding research papers in Experimental Physiology that best meet the journal’s remit of translation and integration.
-Written by Sarah McBride, College of Nursing and Health Innovation