University promotion and tenure criteria and processes should be broadened and made more inclusive to value innovation, entrepreneurship and other forms of scholarly impact, a collaboration led by Oregon State University asserts today in a paper published in Science.
College of Science faculty were awarded $24.4 million in new research grants and awards in fiscal year 2021, a 55% increase over the average of the previous three years and one of the highest award levels ever.
Biophysicist Afua Nyarko has received $820K over a four-year period to conduct research into biological processes important for the regulation of cell growth, memory and kidney function. She hopes that her research will broaden the scope of scientific knowledge, opening new doors for disease treatment.
Funded by the NSF as a Physics Frontiers Center, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, research group at OSU operates under the direction of Xavier Siemens, professor of physics.
A pivotal Oregon State chemistry project – funded by a $493K grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust – will create a distinctive collaboration center for academic and industrial researchers that will bring synthetic chemistry into the digital age.
As a member of the Yakama Nation, Microbiology Ph.D. student Corbin Schuster is interested in the study of human diseases that have a higher incidence among Native peoples, such as toxoplasmosis (a parasitic infection), as well as diseases of salmon, which are central to the food, culture and religion of the Yakama people. He is thankful to not have to separate his culture from his career.
The College of Science awarded two interdisciplinary teams funding to pursue promising leads in mental health and cancer research. One team will investigate the role of the gut-brain axis on sex differences in anxiety, and another will explore ways to develop an synthetic version of HHT-- a rare plant alkaloid that is showing great promise in the development of new medicines for multiple forms of cancer.
Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics, or TRACE-COVID-19, was launched by OSU in April 2020 with door-to-door sampling in Corvallis and expanded to other cities around the state while also adding a wastewater testing component. In December, OSU received a $2 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to create a national TRACE Center that will expand the OSU’s COVID-19 public health project to other states.
College of Science faculty were awarded $15.82 million in new research grants and awards in fiscal year 2020. Two months into the new fiscal year, the College is seeing strong momentum with significant awards totaling more than $3.48 million already.
Biochemists at OSU have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue research on the SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
