Projected allocations for research grants

UNM will receive more than $37 million in federal stimulus funding for research initiatives.

The money, which came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is split between main campus and the Health Sciences Center. The Health Sciences Center will receive more than $21 million and the main campus will receive more than $16 million.
University spokeswoman Karen Wentworth said the grants were awarded in a competitive setting.

“Our researchers turn in proposals to the federal funding agencies, and those federal funding agencies determine which proposals will get grant money,” she said.
Of the money going to the Health Sciences Center, more than $19 million was awarded to the School of Medicine, with roughly $1.6 million going to the College of Pharmacy, and about $32,000 for the School of Nursing.

The largest single grant awarded to main campus for more than $6 million is earmarked for improvements to UNM’s Long Term Ecological Research Networks.

Wentworth said the money for LTER Network will go to improve its Sevilleta station.
“(Sevilleta) is a big biological station we have that’s north of Socorro,” she said. “We do all kinds of long-term ecological research there. What this particular grant will do is help build up the remote sensing infrastructure at the station so the scientists don’t have to drive down there every time they want to check something.”
The second-largest individual grant to main campus was for more than $700,000 for the “Web-based Substance Abuse STD/HIV Prevention,” for which there was no readily available information.

The largest grant the Health Sciences Center received was $2.4 million for “HPV (Human Papillomavirus) Outcomes: Prevention, Epidemiology and Surveillance.”
Wentworth said one of the most interesting grants she knew of was for “Space and Tropospheric Weather” at main campus.

She said this grant is to program computers to study the weather from space. The funding will go to the Configurable Space Microsystems Innovations and Application Center.

“What they’re particularly working on now is programming computer chips so that they can be sent into space via small space cubes,” she said. “We teach students at COSMIAC how to program those chips and reprogram those chips to put it into the little space cubes.”

Health Sciences Center received four more grants worth $1 million or more, which included “Evaluation of a CCR5 Vaccine for HIV infection in a SIV/Macaque model,” “Building Core Programs in Cardiovascular & Metabolic Disease,” “University of New Mexico Cancer Center Support” and “Using Transport to Map the Brain.”