Building Capacity for Research in Ukraine 

This story was originally published in the May issue of the Breakthroughs Newsletter.

The ongoing war in Ukraine is causing devastation that is still being understood. Families have been split up, soldiers have been injured in battle and the psychological impacts on soldiers and citizens are far-reaching.  

Since the war began in 2022, those impacted have been in survival mode, responding to needs in real time. Two Feinberg investigators, Sara Huston, MS, and Steven P. Cohen, MD, have been collaborating with scientists in Ukraine to better understand how war is impacting Ukrainians through inquiries into DNA use for family reunification and better treatment of amputees’ pain. 

A DNA-driven path to reunification 

In collaboration with the Institute for Policy Research at the Buffett Institute of Global Affairs, Huston has been leading a working group designed to reunite Ukrainian families through DNA. A research assistant professor of Pediatrics, Huston was trained in genetics but began working with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), a treaty-based organization leading social and political policy to better locate missing persons globally.  

Huston’s work has led her to work on a variety of different projects, most recently leading the working group, Global Fam DNA, to pilot the use of DNA for a database dedicated to supporting immediate reunification of rescued Ukrainian children with their families and ongoing searches into the future. 

In the late summer of 2025, Huston and colleagues traveled to Warsaw, Poland and Kyiv, Ukraine to collect more information and start interviewing Ukrainian families. The team partnered with local organizations and Universities in Kyiv to build connections on the ground. Their visits are an important part of their work — building trust and learning more about the experiences from experts and families so they can understand how to build systems that could help reunify families. 

Many other nonprofits and organizations are working on family reunification due to war. Huston said there are dozens of organizations with specific missions doing the work to try to reunify families and track children who have been separated from their families.  

The working group led by Huston and her collaborator Tabitha Bonilla, PhD, associate professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, are planning to convene all of these groups to have conversations about what they have learned during their time in Ukraine and analyze the work of various organizations. 

“What I hear from a lot of people is that they don’t have capacity to work outside of their specific mission toward the larger goal of reunifying families through DNA databases,” Huston said. “Some groups are doing one-to-one DNA testing and reunification. Others are trying to track the numbers, but the overarching facts are elusive as everyone seems to be working with different figures.” 

As a geneticist, Huston wants to return to the ultimate goal of understanding the gaps in how to safely use DNA as one tool. The hope is that this research on DNA use for family reunification can provide guidance and set a precedent for how to uniformly use DNA to identify missing persons and reunite them with their families.  

With policies and protections in place, this research could inform efforts across the globe to provide documentation of human rights crimes and build a database that would assist in bringing families back together when they have been separated due to disaster or crisis. 

“This work is tough, but it is rewarding, and there is a layer of hope even as we see the destruction of lives,” Huston said. 

Research on pain and recovery after amputation 

Cohen, the Edmond I Eger Professor of Anesthesiology and a retired U.S. Army colonel, has been working in military settings and studying the impact of war for nearly his entire career.  

Prior to joining Northwestern in summer 2024, Cohen had received an email from a physician in Ukraine asking about research protocols for research they wanted to conduct. Although Cohen receives many of these emails, he decided to follow up and see if there was an opportunity for collaboration.  

He traveled to Ukraine for several weeks and was able to meet his collaborator Roman Smolynets, an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist at Multidisciplinary Clinical Hospital of Emergency and Intensive Care in Lviv, Ukraine. Since then, Smolynets has visited Chicago, and the two continue to publish research. 

In October 2025, Cohen was the senior author on a paper published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation that looked at a Botox-like substance and its impact on postamputation pain for amputees in collaboration with investigators at Ukrainian hospitals.   

The study, which involved 160 amputees treated at two hospitals in western Ukraine between 2022 and 2024, found that botulinum toxin injections provided greater short-term relief for phantom limb pain than standard medical and surgical care among Ukrainian war amputees. 

“Botulinum toxin injected into painful stumps of residual limbs and around neuromas was in some outcome measures more effective than comprehensive medical and surgical treatment at one-month post-treatment,” Cohen said. 

Another study published in eClinicalMedicine looked at amputees’ pain and their psychological symptoms. It is the first study to track over time how anxiety, depression and quality of life interact with pain in an amputee population.  

The investigators considered two different types of post-amputation pain: phantom limb pain, which is pain that feels like it comes from the missing limb, or residual limb pain, which is pain in the remaining stump.  

For phantom pain, psychological distress tended to come first. Specifically, amputees who had higher levels of depression or poorer quality of life (poor social support, poor function and poor sleep) shortly after their injury were more likely to report persistent phantom pain months later. 

For residual limb pain, the pattern was different. Participants with more severe residual pain at baseline were more likely to develop depression over time.  

Although this research is taking place during wartime, the findings have implications for the broader public, according to Cohen 

For amputees of wartime and other circumstances, Cohen’s research on pain relief and the psychological impact of amputation can be applied for use outside of wartime and beyond to aid in the long road of healing that is necessary after war.  

“The research that comes out of the military impacts people beyond the war. While it is difficult to do research during wartime, a lot of discoveries can come out of war,” Cohen said. 

Ben Schamisso contributed to this story.