Ilia State University is proud to announce that David Otiashvili, Associate Professor of Healthcare at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Medicine, has been awarded the Distinguished International Scientist Collaboration Award (DISCA) from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). This prestigious award will support a collaborative research visit to Yale University, where Prof. Otiashvili will work alongside renowned expert Prof. Frederick Altice to develop a protocol for a comprehensive systematic review. The project, titled “A New Agenda for Implementation Research: A Systematic Review for the Modern Era of Substance Use Treatment,” aims to bridge the “fidelity evidence gap” by synthesizing how implementation fidelity is measured in modern interventions like Medications for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD) and telehealth. This initiative is strategically aligned with the ongoing Georgian Implementation Science Fogarty Training (GIFT) program, a multi-year partnership between Ilia State University and Yale University. GIFT scholars and faculty will play a central role in executing the systematic review, providing them with a high-impact, hands-on training opportunity to strengthen Georgia’s research capacity in implementation science.