Our Team | Office of Research | UC Davis School of Medicine

Director of Grants Facilitation Unit
emchedin@ucdavis.edu

Erica assists investigators in preparing grant proposals, manuscripts, responses to reviewers, and scientific articles. She is highly experienced in the National Institutes of Health granting process and has helped prepare proposals for other national grant funding agencies, private foundations and UC Davis submissions. She assists investigators with large, multi-disciplinary, multi-investigator efforts such as center grants, program projects, and training grants. She has played key roles in successfully securing funding for the Clinical and Translational Science Center, the NeuroTherapeutics Research Institute, and the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, among others. She also co-teaches workshops and courses on grant writing. Chédin (née Seitz) received her Ph.D. from UC Davis, and then pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California. She was the recipient of a T32 graduate student fellowship, a T32 post-doctoral fellowship, and an F32 NRSA award from the NIH. She has published multiple scientific manuscripts and book chapters in top, peer-reviewed, international journals.

Research Development Specialist
hkobhi@ucdavis.edu 

Hardeep helps shape research trajectories through mentorship, fostering research collaborations, and supporting strategic proposal development and critical review. She works with individuals across the research career spectrum and specializes in guiding early-career investigators. Before joining the UC Davis School of Medicine Office of Research, Dr. Obhi worked in research development at UC Santa Cruz to build the biomedical portion of their research enterprise by assisting investigators with numerous federal and foundation proposals. She is an interdisciplinary health researcher with a track record of securing external funding, including an NIH/NIA F31 award during her doctoral studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Gerontology from Iowa State University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center, where she collaborated with interdisciplinary colleagues to research cognitive aging. Prior to her Ph.D., she earned an M.A. in Research and Experimental Psychology and a B.A. in Psychology from San Jose State University. Dr. Obhi has presented research at numerous aging and health conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals.

Research Development Specialist
jaengler@ucdavis.edu

Jeffrey helps coordinate the activities of administrators and faculty in the preparation of grant proposals, primarily for program projects/center grants in basic and translational biomedical research (P01, U54, U01, P30, P50, etc.). He also works as needed on other types of grant proposals, including individual research grants, administrative supplements, and infrastructure grants. In his previous position as Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics in the Schools of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and as Associate Dean in the Graduate School, Engler was awarded more than $15 million in extramural funding, more than half of which was awarded as PI; this funding included R01, R21, R25, P50, and P30 funding from NIH as well as funding from NSF, the Office of Research Integrity, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the U.S. Department of Education. He also managed two core facilities and was a member of several disease-focused center programs. Engler taught the research ethics course for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at UAB and served as Research Integrity Officer at UAB for 3.5 years. He has 81 peer-reviewed publications, 20 book chapters/reviews, and 4 patents. Since 2016, he has been a co-investigator on two research studies to identify how to coach new faculty members (particularly those from groups underrepresented in the biomedical workforce) to become effective grant writers; these ongoing studies have resulted in 5 publications thus far and are funded by the NIH through the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN).

Research Development Specialist
hkahughes@ucdavis.edu

Heather assists and advises clinical, translational, and basic science investigators in preparing NIH R-series research grants (R01, R21, R03) and mechanisms for research awards from other funding agencies. She also assists with writing and preparing strategic and critical grants supporting research or institutional training programs (e.g., T32, K12, R25 mechanisms). Hughes was awarded her Ph.D. in immunology at UC Davis and is the author of multiple successfully funded applications and proposals submitted to competitive fellowships, including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the UC Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship. In addition, she authored multiple NIH diversity supplements and assisted in writing and editing R-series grant proposals and collaborative grants during her graduate and post-doctoral studies. She has also published several first-author publications detailing her research on immune dysfunction in neurodevelopmental disorders. Hughes received her bachelor of science degree in Dietetics from Sacramento State University, where she received several scholarships, including the prestigious Faculty Endowment Award.