Success Stories

One of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's top-funded research projects involves building a diverse health database of over a million people through the All of Us program.

All of Us is a research program run by the National Institutes of Health, and UAB is part of the Southern All of Us Network. The program is funded by UAB's second largest active grant at $12 million per year for five years. It also received a one-time grant of $7 million to develop a retention program.

Tick-borne infections can lead to serious illnesses – and even death – in people and pets. To create effective treatments for these diseases, scientists first must figure out the basic infection biology of the ticks they study. Meghan Hermance, an assistant professor at the University of South Alabama, recently received a $2.59 million five-year NIH grant to study the infection dynamics of a tick-borne bunyavirus called severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus or SFTSV.

University of Arkansas researchers will team up with Google software engineers and NIGMS in an effort to create learning modules on artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in biomedical research.

The university secured a $140,135 grant to help address the computational requirements of AI-focused studies with the use of cloud computing technology.

Two COBRES from New Hampshire, Center of Integrated Biomedical and Bioengineering Research (University of New Hampshire) and Center for Quantitative Biology (Dartmouth), have received a second year of funding from NIGMS to coordinate SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance in New Hampshire and Vermont, including wastewater surveillance.

NIH has awarded $11.5M in Phase II funding to the Arkansas Children’s Research Institute based on the successes of the COBRE Center for Translational Pediatric Research, established five years ago. The center applies a cutting-edge systems biology approach to understand how diseases like cancer form in children’s developing bodies.

Under the leadership of Alan Tackett, associate director for basic research at ACRI and director of the CTPR, the center is at the forefront of this type of research.

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Division of Cardiovascular Disease have been awarded a $3.7M grant from the NIH National Heart Lung and Blood Institute to study how genetically determined differences in natriuretic peptide levels (heart hormones) regulate the handling of glucose metabolism and use of energy while resting and while exercising.

The grant is being used to fund a first-of-its-kind clinical trial that will recruit healthy individuals through a “genome-first” approach and perform deep metabolic phenotyping to understand the underlying mechanisms responsible for the regulation of the body’s metabolism through NPs.

Clemson University scientists have received $649,898 from the USDA NIFA to study how microorganisms from ruderal grasses – native plants regarded as weeds – can help corn thrive in dry soil, a protective measure against the increase in droughts brought by climate change.

Drought can cause issues for grain crops and three Clemson University scientists are working to get to the root of the problem.

The scientists believe crops have a lesson or two to learn from their weedy relatives when it comes to growing in drier soils. The trick is to harbor beneficial microorganisms on and around the roots to enhance the ability of plants to withstand harsher environments.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is leading a 22-institution research collaboration aimed at smoothing this transition by building strong partnerships between two- and four-year colleges. With a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the team will conduct research aimed at filling a critical gap in the national understanding of what it takes to help transfer students succeed. Nebraska, whose share of the award is nearly $1.5 million, will headquarter the new research hub.

It is one of the first four research hubs funded through a new NSF program that builds on the agency’s long-standing Scholarships in STEM program, or S-STEM, which funds scholarships and institutional support systems for low-income STEM students. Through the research hubs, NSF aims to identify what’s working — and what’s not — at S-STEM sites using mixed-methods research. Each hub has a different focus, with the overall goal of pinpointing the conditions that facilitate success for the STEM students.

The University of Kentucky’s Center for Cancer and Metabolism (CCM) will continue its critical mission to research the metabolism of cancer with a renewed Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant award from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. The prestigious grant — totaling $11.4 million — will continue to fund UK’s CCM over the next five years.

The Department of Defense awarded $297,831 to Kartik Balachandran, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the U of A, to study the effects of particulate matter pollution on the nasal airway and lung interface.

Balachandran will create the first in vitro benchtop system to incorporate both the upper and lower respiratory systems into a single model.

Over the two-year term of the grant, Balachandran will create and validate a novel airway-lung-on-a-chip, or AirLOC, system engineered from human cells. This will incorporate a multilayered, cell culture platform that mimics both normal and asthmatic nasal and lung epithelia – the tissue that covers all organs and body surfaces.