Alum Advances Cardiovascular Health Equity.
Photo courtesy of Jena Ungarten.
Alum Advances Cardiovascular Health Equity
Jena Ungarten (SPH ’20) draws on her master’s in epidemiology from the School of Public Health and the experience she gained working in emergency response during the COVID-19 pandemic to manage clinical trials, including a recent study of valvular heart disease.
Jena Ungarten (SPH ’20) often juggles 15 to 20 clinical trials at once. “My day-to-day consists of a lot of calls,” she says.
As a senior project manager at the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) Clinical Trials Center in New York City, Ungarten is responsible for overseeing the planning, coordination, and execution of clinical investigations into new and innovative therapies intended to treat cardiovascular disease. She serves as a liaison between sponsors of the research, often medical device companies or public research institutions, and her colleagues at CRF to facilitate communication and ensure that deliverables meet agreed-upon timelines, regulatory requirements, and quality standards.
Ungarten, who completed the Master of Science in Epidemiology program at the School of Public Health in 2020, has worked at CRF for the past two years. Before that, she worked for the NYC Department of Mental Health and Hygiene as an emergency response staffing strategist. She joined the agency in late 2021 as the city was winding down its responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and m-pox outbreaks. Her job involved collaborating with internal stakeholders to extract lessons from that period to improve policies and procedures going forward.
“The people at the Department of Health are some of the best people you’ll ever work with. Something I will always take away from that job is how important really listening to people about their experiences is,” she says. Ungarten says her current role is largely about managing expectations. “I’m liaising between sponsors who want one thing, and my team who may want another thing. [I’m] taking in both sides to see if there are ways to improve current processes and make it easier for everyone to maybe get a little bit of what they want.”
Recently, Ungarten witnessed the positive reception of a successful collaboration when her team presented the results of their project, the PREVUE-VALVE study, at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics 2025 Meeting, an annual scientific symposium held by CRF to promote education in the field of interventional cardiovascular medicine. The study—sponsored by CRF and funded by grants from several health technology companies, including Abbott, Edwards Lifesciences, and Philips—examined the national prevalence of valvular heart disease (VHD) and its subtypes, as well as the effects of age, sex, race, and ethnicity on VHD prevalence.
“Anecdotally, physicians have noticed that they don’t treat valvular heart disease as much in minority populations, so we did an epidemiologic study to try to assess the prevalence of valvular heart disease in the U.S. population,” says Ungarten. “We used pharmacies, such as CVS and Walgreens, to identify patients, so if you had a relevant prescription with CVS or Walgreens, we would reach out to you and ask you to participate.”
In total, Ungarten and her colleagues recruited 3,000 people between the ages of 65 and 85, who, following an initial screening, received an at-home visit—a relatively novel experience in the world of clinical research. The design had limitations—for example, one applicant experiencing homelessness could not be accommodated. However, loss-to-follow-up is a major challenge in clinical research, notes Ungarten, and because participants in the PREVUE-VALVE study did not need to visit a hospital or other facility, the design eliminated several common barriers to participation. This allowed recruitment and enrollment of a sample more broadly representative of the U.S. population, she says.
During the study visits, an echocardiogram and 12-lead EKG were performed, and blood samples and a standardized health status assessment were conducted. Based on analysis of the collected data, the team estimated that at least 10 million Americans are currently living with VHD of mild or greater severity, and most of whom are unaware of their condition.
“It was a huge undertaking, especially reaching out to older Black Americans who are 80-plus who live in rural areas, but we would get on the phone with people and explain the study to them. That was a really cool part of my mission,” says Ungarten.
Overall, the findings indicated a substantial, under-recognized burden of the disease, particularly among older people and women, suggesting a need for greater access to screening and treatment, she says.
Following their presentation, the team received praise for the study, including comments that it “sets a new gold standard” for how to conduct such research at a national level and represents “a new paradigm for what preventive cardiology may look like.”
“It was really cool to see how well-received it was,” says Ungarten. Her work on the project has become a point of pride for her, something she can point to as a direct application of her degree in epidemiology. “Just having this deeper understanding of the things that we learned at BU makes the work more special and more interesting.”
