News & Updates

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing uncertainties in the higher education world, West Virginia University received $195 million in external funding for research and other sponsored programs this past fiscal year.

Researchers at Kansas State University were given a $1 million grant to find out how to protect workers at meat packing plants from the coronavirus.

Alaska INBRE, supported by grant number P20GM103395 from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Alaska, has committed $101,700 funding to date for COVID-19 research.

The South Carolina IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE) is pleased to announce that a team of South Carolina biomedical researchers has received a National Institutes of Health National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) P20 collaboration award. This goal of this one-year funding opportunity is to encourage collaborations between NIGMS Institutional Development Award (IDeA) programs investigators while providing students a broad continuum of research opportunities. The team of Dr. Srikripa Chandrasekaran from Furman University and Dr. Lukasz Kozubowski from Clemson University were awarded $147,340 for their project entitled, “SC INBRE Collaborative Administrative Supplement – Role of Hsp90 in Resistance of Cryptococcus neoformans to Fluconazole.” Dr. Chandrasekaran is a current recipient of an SC INBRE Developmental Research Project Program award; Dr. Kozubowski is a member of the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) Eukaryotic Pathogens Innovation Center.

The National Institutes of Health today announced a $12 million award for outreach and engagement efforts in ethnic and racial minority communities disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The award to RTI International, a non-profit research institution, will support teams in 11 states established as part of the NIH Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities. These teams have received initial funding to immediately create CEAL programs, and RTI will serve as the Technical and Administrative Support and Coordination (TASC) center.

Arkansas food scientist Kristen Gibson is leading a multi-institutional research effort to ensure that dine-in restaurant customers will not be exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

University of Louisiana at Lafayette researchers have developed technology that’s assisting city officials in New Orleans understand risks associated with economic recovery, and are expanding the project statewide thanks to a National Science Foundation grant. NSF awarded UL Lafayette’s Center for Visual and Decision Informatics a one-year, $187,477 grant for the “RAPID: Visual Analytics Approach to Real-Time Tracking of COVID-19” project. With the grant, CVDI researchers will enhance its COVID-19 Resilient Economy Support Tool, or CREST.

University of Oklahoma scientists led by Michael Biggerstaff, OU School of Meteorology professor, deployed a Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching (SMART) weather radar south of Mobile, Alabama, in advance of the landfall of Hurricane Sally. There they measured the structure of the winds in the hurricane boundary layer, the lowest mile of air above the ground.

The physical characteristics of a plant can reveal a lot about its underlying genetics. How many kernels of wheat does a single plant produce? How quickly does a corn plant grow? How much water does it use? Understanding a plant’s physical traits, and linking those traits to specific genes, ultimately drives development of improved crops, higher yields for farmers and greater food security worldwide.

The University of Wyoming College of Business has awarded McMurry Summer Research Fellowships to economists Linda Thunström and David Finnoff, in recognition of their outstanding research in the COVID-19 health crisis.