Joosun Shin receives a competitive NIH R21 grant to advance dyspnea care among heavy smokers

UCLA Joe C. Wen School of Nursing Assistant Professor Joosun Shin, PhD, RN, AGACNP-BC, has received an R21 grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NIH/NHLBI) to develop a new approach to identifying and managing dyspnea, or shortness of breath, among people who smoke, the group at highest risk of visiting a pulmonologist and/or thoracic oncologists and diagnosing pulmonary disease and/or lung cancer.

The award builds on Shin's research program in Precision Dyspnea Science. The project will use machine learning (ML) models to better understand the causes of dyspnea and to develop a diagnostic framework to assess and manage the condition. 

Tobacco use impacts more than 1 billion adults worldwide, and an estimated 40% experience dyspnea. For those roughly 400 million smokers, the symptom can significantly impair daily activities and quality of life. The new NIH-funded project builds on this research program by applying ML methods to smokers with dyspnea. Rather than simply predicting risk, these explainable ML models can help researchers and clinicians understand which factors contribute to a prediction, potentially providing better insight into the different forms of dyspnea. 

“Dyspnea is complex with many factors contributing to the condition,” Shin says. “Our goal is to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and develop a more precise way to identify different dyspnea subtypes so that patients can ultimately receive better, more individualized care.”

Shin joined the UCLA Joe C. Wen School of Nursing faculty in 2025 after completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. An alumna of UCLA Nursing’s Advanced Practice Registered Nurse program, she earned her PhD in Nursing from the University of California, San Francisco.