LSU has been awarded an $18.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to support the university’s Louisiana Biomedical Research Network, which was established in September 2001.
This $18.5 million grant is being matched by a $1.2 million supplement from the Louisiana Board of Regents. The latest award marks the third five-year grant the program has received. The total funding awarded for the LBRN program is now more than $55 million.
LBRN provides infrastructure support, education, training and research opportunities for students and faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions. It also fosters connections of primarily undergraduate institutions with biomedical research intensive universities and institutes within the state.
“The overall goal of this competitive grant is to facilitate the growth of biomedical research activities in the state,” Thomas Klei, LSU professor and principal investigator of the LBRN, says in a prepared statement. “Previous funding enabled the LBRN to establish a strong foundation for interdisciplinary and interinstitutional research, cyber-infrastructure, education, training and mentoring programs.”
Klei says the LBRN programs are poised to increase the biomedical workforce within Louisiana and create a pipeline of needed future research scientists. During the past five years, he says, faculty at the participating undergraduate institutions have won 17 federal research awards for more than $5 million.
“This success will continue as the [$18.5 million] grant provides research opportunities for an increasingly diverse pool of both graduate and undergraduate students and faculty and will encourage collaborative research activities,” he says.
Through the program, research is conducted by faculty and students at seven universities in the state, including Louisiana Tech University, LSU Shreveport, Grambling State University, Southern University, Southeastern Louisiana University and Xavier University. Researchers and students at these schools are paired with mentors and collaborators at the state’s biomedical research-intensive centers, including LSU, the LSU Health Sciences Centers in Shreveport and New Orleans, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Tulane Medical Center and Tulane National Primate Research Center.
