Grants

A $20 million grant announced today from the National Science Foundation will fund a five-year initiative by Maine science institutes to revolutionize the understanding and management of coastal ocean ecosystems. This is the first large-scale effort to develop a cutting-edge, DNA-based toolset for states to monitor aquatic life in their coastal waters. Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the University of Maine will lead the project in conjunction with collaborators in education, government agencies, citizens' groups and local industry.

The Massage Therapy Foundation (MTF) has awarded $210,000 for a research grant to the Defense and Veterans Center for Integrative Pain Management (DVCIPM), Rockville, Md. Dr. Krista Highland, Deputy Director of Science, DVCIPM, is the Primary Investigator of the two-year study, 'Massage Service Integration in a Military Primary Care Clinic: Implementation and Impact Study.' The project investigates how the benefits of massage therapy affect the opioid crisis and addresses options for mitigating the pain and opioid emergency in the United States.

NIH's All of Us Research Program has awarded $4.6 million to Color, a health technology company in Burlingame, California, to establish the program's nationwide genetic counseling resource. With the goal of speeding up health research breakthroughs, All of Us plans to sequence the genomes of 1 million participants from diverse communities across the U.S. Color's network of genetic counselors will help participants understand what the genomic testing results mean for their health and their families.

Lewina Lee, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and clinical research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston, has received a five-year, $3.5 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute on Aging to establish the Boston Early Adversity and Mortality Study (BEAMS).

Lehigh University will receive $298,665 in Pennsylvania Department of Education grant funding to provide an innovative training program for school principals.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) received a generous donation from Suga International Holdings Limited (SUGA) for the establishment of Hong Kong's first research platform focusing on Urban Agriculture.

Engineers at the University of California, Riverside are working on a search engine that searches keywords for real-time text, photo and video from social media and surveillance cameras alongside data from sensors, like fire detectors and security alarms. The research, supported by a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant, aims to develop a single search interface across all potential sources.

Brooklyn Bioscience, a startup commercializing university research to detoxify a dangerous class of pesticides, recently received funding from the National Science Foundation. Their engineered proteins will remediate and detoxify organophosphates (OPs), which cannot easily be removed by conventional means. The process will be appealing for high-value crops like wine grapes, tea and especially cannabis because OPs, when vaporized and inhaled, are exponentially more toxic than when ingested by mouth.