Grants roundup: Aid to Zimbabwe med school, and other recent funding
Michele Barry
Michele Barry, MD, senior associate dean for global health, and her colleagues have received a $10 million grant to help improve medical education at the University of Zimbabwe over the next five years. The grant was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Medical Education Partnership Initiative.
Barry is a co-principal investigator (along with Bonnie Maldonado, MD, chief of infectious disease at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, and David Katzenstein, MD, professor of infectious diseases) for the grant called the Novel Education Clinical Trainees and Researchers program, or NECTAR. Stanford will partner with the University of Zimbabwe Medical School and University of Colorado to strengthen medical education in innovative ways.
Hit hard by the HIV epidemic, political instability and economic woes, the country has insufficient numbers of well-trained medical professionals to take care of its people. This grant will focus on increasing the number of faculty, improving medical curriculum and enhancing the retention of medical students.
“The grant will permit many of our faculty to spend short time rotations focusing on teaching and mentoring at the University of Zimbabwe Medical School,” Barry said.
Other medical school faculty members who are recent grant recipients include:
PI: Russ Altman, MD, PhD, professor of bioengineering, medicine and genetics.
Amount/type: $10.6 million over four years/renewal.
Funding source: National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
Purpose: Continued funding for the Simbios National Center for Physics-Based Simulation of Biological Structure.
* * *
PI: C. Garrison Fathman, MD, professor of medicine and division chief of immunology & rheumatology.
Amount/type: $3.5 million over three years/new funding.
Funding source: National Institute of Aging.
Purpose: To characterize the immune phenotype of 750 normal subjects between 20 and 90 years of age.
* * *
PI: Mark Musen, MD, PhD, professor of medical informatics.
Amount/type: $18 million over five years/renewal.
Funding source: National Human Genome Research Institute.
Purpose: Continued funding for the National Center for Biomedical Ontology.
* * *
PIs: Hannah Valantine, MD, professor of cardiovascular medicine; Stephen Quake, PhD, professor of bioengineering.
Amount/type: $2.5 million over three years/new funding.
Funding source: Stimulus funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Purpose: Development of a non-invasive sequencing-based method for detecting acute and chronic rejection of solid organ transplants.
Office of Communication