The first half of April brings; five Goldwater Scholars to UT, ranking number one in the nation; eight UT students receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships; a distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology receives more than $1.1 million in grants from the Army Research Office; two research projects selected to receive Engaged Scholarship Incentive Grants for fiscal year 2021; Tickle College of Engineering announces their 2020 Faculty and Staff Awards winners; and an interdisciplinary team from UT and the Firefighters Burn Center developed an app to meet recovery needs of burn center patients.
College of Education Health and Human Sciences
Recognitions, October 30
UT Professor Awarded NIH MIRA Grant for 3D Genome Structure Research
A UT biophysicist has been awarded a $1.84 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute for General Medical Science (NIGMS) to investigate how the 3D folded structure of the human genome reacts to physical stress in health and disease.
The award provides funding to operate Rachel Patton McCord’s lab and research program. McCord is an assistant professor in UT’s Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology.
NIGMS is among the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The MIRA program provides long-term stability—the funding is granted over five years—and allows for flexibility if the direction of a project shifts.
McCord’s project seeks to clarify the role of a chromosome’s structure in its biological response to physical stress, which can inform future disease diagnosis and treatment.