University of Michigan leading in National Institutes of Health stimulus dollars
University of Michigan researchers have earned $61.1 million in grants fueled by the federal stimulus package passed by Congress earlier this year.
The funding, which comes to U-M through nearly 160 grants, including 113 from the National Institutes of Health, is the most received by any U.S. university to date.
The funds behind the grants were part of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress this spring as an economic stimulus bill. U-M researchers have also received stimulus dollars through the Energy Department for renewable energy projects.
The NIH grants to U-M, most of which went to the medical school, totaled $21.1 million.
One of the U-M projects that will benefit from increased funding is looking at a vaccine to prevent childhood ear infections. The project received more than $546,000 in additional grants from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders for its work on isolating a protein for the vaccine, said Janet Gilsdorf, a professor and pediatric infectious diseases service director at the medical school.
“These infections are extremely common and extremely disruptive to children and their parents. And they're extremely costly to treat,” she said. Estimations by researchers that are already several years old put the economic impact at between $2 billion and $4 billion in costs in the United States every year, she said.
The grant will allow Gilsdorf to hire a junior scientist, retain a mid-career scientist and provide partial support for another scientist.
“This has been a wonderful thing for biomedical research and hopefully we’ll be able to do this work a little quicker,” Gilsdorf said.
Tina Reed can be reached at tinareed@annarbor.com or follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/treedinaa.