Grants

With $1.9 million from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a University of Houston chemist is exploring the link between copper protein molecules in brain cells and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

A transformative new scholarship program established by Weill Cornell Medicine will eliminate medical education debt for all students who qualify for financial aid, the institution announced today. A lead gift from The Starr Foundation, directed by Weill Cornell Medicine Overseer Maurice R. Greenberg, in partnership with gifts from Joan and Board of Overseers Chairman Emeritus Sanford I. Weill and the Weill Family Foundation have made this longstanding goal possible.

At a time when cancer is the leading cause of death among Hispanics in the United States, faculty members at The University of Texas at San Antonio have received a new grant to reduce the risk of this deadly disease. The funding will allow UTSA researchers to expand their Building a Healthy Temple program, which integrates spiritual and physical health to reduce chronic disease risks, to 30 churches on San Antonio's Westside and in the Rio Grande Valley.

A new $3 million grant to support a clinical trial evaluating a combination therapy to prevent triple-negative breast cancer from recurring will be led in the clinic by Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE, the Alan and Jill Miller Professor in Breast Cancer Excellence in the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC) at the University of Pennsylvania. The grant was awarded by Stand Up 2 Cancer (SU2C) in partnership with Genentech, and will be administered by the organization's scientific partner, the American Association for Cancer Reseach (AACR).

Thomas M. Ryan '75 Hon. '99, former chairman, president and CEO of CVS, and his wife, Cathy Ryan, have made a gift of $35 million to the University of Rhode Island, the largest private contribution in its history. The gift includes $24 million for the George & Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience, $10 million to establish the Thomas M. Ryan Scholars, and a $1 million challenge for men's and women's basketball.

Paul Tran is working to develop a highly predictive genetic risk score that will tell parents whether their baby is at significant risk for type 1 diabetes.

Matthew Sigman, distinguished professor and chair of the University of Utah department of chemistry, is part of a vanguard of researchers solving problems in chemistry using data science and machine learning. Sigman is part of a National Science Foundation-supported team spanning five universities charged with creating a new generation of data chemists through their Center for Computer Assisted Synthesis (C-CAS).

NASA announced it is awarding a team of researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College a grant to develop a detector capable of sensing and counting single photons that could be crucial to future NASA astrophysics missions. The extremely sensitive detector would allow scientists to see the faintest observable objects in space, such as Earth-like planets around other stars.

Two Jefferson Lab accelerator scientists have received funding to design accelerators that could be used for wastewater treatment, flue-gas cleanup and beyond.