Grant money flows into more than 500 projects

Neil Offen

Nov. 4, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- DURHAM -- Over the past six months or so, nearly a quarter of a billion dollars has poured into the research coffers of local universities.

The stimulus funding -- more precisely, money for research from last February's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- nationwide offered $15 billion as part of the federal government's incentive plan to spur job growth and retention as well as prod scientific advancement.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University have taken a significant chunk of that funding, with Carolina receiving around $82 million so far and Duke around $147 million.

The money has gone to more than 500 or so different local research projects, ranging from "Mechanisms and Functional Outcomes of Exercise Progression Models in the Elderly" to "Does Enhanced School-Readiness Affect Adult Health of African Americans?" to "Identification of DNA Elements Governing Chromatin Function C. elegans."

"The money has flowed where we would have guessed," said Tony Waldrop, vice chancellor for research and economic development at UNC. "It's gone mostly to medical research and affiliated areas."

That's not surprising, since the vast majority of the funding has come from two federal agencies: the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Here's a look at a few of the projects that have won stimulus funding over the last few months:

UNC researcher David Peden, a professor of pediatrics and microbiology and immunology at Carolina, received $852,000 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study "Immunobiology of Acute Environmental Asthma."

The idea is to look at the role immune processes play in mediating acute environmental asthma. Specifically, Peden and his colleagues are looking at how low levels of endotoxin -- normally an air pollutant -- can help asthmatics respond to allergens that otherwise would close their airways.

Meng Chen, an assistant professor of biology at Duke, won his first federal funding through the ARRA program -- a $150,000 award from the National Science Foundation -- to expand his research on the development of light-harvesting structures in the cells of developing plants.

Chen's lab uses light-dependent plant seedling development (or photomorphogenesis) as a model system to address how cellular genetic programs are regulated by environmental cues. Biofuels may be improved by this work.

David Zajac, an associate professor of dental ecology at UNC, working with the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, is continuing to research the "Speech of Young Males with Fragile X Syndrome" with help from $134,380 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The objective is to determine what influences intelligibility in boys with fragile X and Down syndromes. The researchers are using a customized computer program originally designed for adult speakers. With the new money, they plan to create a new, child-friendly elicitation, recording and analysis module for the computer program.

Thomas Coffman, a professor in the Division of Nephrology at the Department of Medicine at Duke received an award of $999,385 over two years from the National Institutes of Health. The money will go to a project entitled "Genetic Determinants of Susceptibility to Kidney Disease in African Americans."

Coffman's lab also has received two other stimulus grants, $110,401 from the National Institutes of Health over two years for "Angiogenic Signals in Diabetic Complications" and $767,680 over two years from the National Institutes of Health for "Angiotensin Receptor Genes and Blood Pressure Regulation."

Newstex ID: KRTB-0052-39447784