Second round of UO-OHSU seed funding announced

New funding for collaborative research teams examining everything from the predictive modeling of healthcare-associated infections to preventing occupational burnout among K-12 educators was announced on Aug. 2 as part of the OHSU-UO Collaborative Seed Grant program.

The program creates new collaborations between researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and the University of Oregon. Since its launch in February 2018, the initiative has paved the way for 10 collaborative research teams to get their projects off the ground.

The latest round of grants adds an 11th team conducting “convening” research. It also extends funding to support three of the inaugural “piloting” teams to continue to pursue their research goals as they submit major external grant proposals.

Convening grants involve laying the groundwork for collaborative ideas that are likely to lead to success in generating revenue and future grant funding. Piloting grants support studies designed to provide feasibility evidence or preliminary data for joint UO-OHSU grant applications.

The recipients are:

  • Project Resilience (Convening): A neurological and psychosocial collaborative to prevent occupational burnout of K-12 educators – Alexander Stevens, OHSU, and Christen Knowles, UO.
  • Nanohoops as New Materials for Multiplexed Biological Imaging (Piloting Phase Two) – Ramesh Jasti, UO, and Xiaolin Nan, OHSU.
  • Developing Bio-Inspired Fractal Implants to Restore Vision to Patients with Retinal Diseases: In Vivo Studies (Piloting Phase Two) – Richard Taylor, UO, and Trevor McGill, OHSU.
  • Predicting Healthcare-Associated Clostridioides Difficile Infection Probabilities in Inpatient Units (Piloting Phase Two) – Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, UO, and Robert Martindale, OHSU.

Additional piloting grants (Phase I for new research teams) are due to be announced in December 2019. Eventually, all funded research teams will build on the seed grant activities to propose external funding requests to the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Justice, MacArthur Foundation, Templeton Foundation and other funders of research.

The initial idea for the seed-funding program emerged during a daylong summit that took place in 2017. Researchers and institutional leaders from OHSU and UO identified research topics where each institution has complementary strengths, discussed existing barriers to collaboration and brainstormed solutions.

OHSU and UO are both developing major new research facilities thanks to unprecedented gifts from the same benefactors, Phil and Penny Knight, who provided support for the UO’s Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact and OHSU’s Knight Cancer Institute.

Visit the OHSU-UO Partnership website for more information.