UConn Awarded Largest Research Grant In School History

FARMINGTON, CT — The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Connecticut a $40 million research grant award, the largest in the University’s history.

The grant is for the UConn School of Medicine for "further advancing molecular research nationally for chemistry, materials science, and bioscience."

This NSF grant will establish a new future distributed Network for Advanced NMR, led and based at UConn’s medical school in collaboration with the University of Georgia and the University of Wisconsin. NMR, UConn Health officials said, stands for nuclear magnetic resonance, a powerful method for analyzing molecules.

The network has three main goals

• To provide institutional researchers across the country with open access to the most powerful instruments; simplify the discovery and use of NMR resources; and foster good data stewardship. It will allow researchers across the U.S.
• To expand their own biomedical research study findings.
• Collectively contribute any new scientific insights to the evolving NAN knowledge bases.

Researchers will be able to visit or deliver their samples for analysis using state-of-the-art 1.1 GHz instruments located in Madison, WI and Athens, GA. Both instruments will be linked to a central hub based at UConn Health in Farmington that will assist discovery and scheduling, host knowledge bases with information on optimal experiment design, and securely archive the collected data.

"This new infrastructure, along with the network of scientists to support it, will advance research in biological sciences across the country through innovative experimentation and new biological insights," said NSF Assistant Director for Biological Sciences Joanne Tornow.

See more on UConn Today.