NIH Genomic Innovator Awards – Award For Early Researchers
NIH Awards Early Researchers in the field of genome biology, genomic medicine, technology development, and societal implications of genomic advances. It is called The Genomic Innovator Awards.
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health, started the NIH Genomic Innovators Awards in 2018.
Unlike traditional research grants, these special NIH awards to Early Researchers will provide funding to investigators with outstanding records of productivity as they pursue essential research areas. This program contributes to the ongoing NIH effort to expedite scientific innovation by promoting funding to scientists, prompting improved productivity and facilitating flexible, ambitious, and original research.
Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D., Director of NHGRI, said that NHGRI was pleased to announce The Genomic Innovator Awards. He added that this would help talented investigators pursue their research ideas in a highly agile fashion. This award has enormous potential to make meaningful contributions to genomics in the coming years.
NIH Awards Early Researchers– Following Principal Investigator will receive the Award:
1. Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Ph.D., at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha. He aims to develop technologies that will address common challenges relating to developing and breeding mouse models
. Mouse models are essential for biomedical research. Given the frequent use of mouse models around the globe, addressing these challenges is key and may have a lasting impact on biomedical research.2. Eric Gamazon, Ph.D., at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee. He studies the genomic and environmental basis of physical characteristics, including hair and eye color, personality traits, and disease risk. Dr. Gamazon is in a process to develop computational tools for the analysis of all such observable characteristics relating to medical conditions.
NIH Awards Early Researchers is being considered as a novel initiative by the NIH
3. Jason Vassy, M.D., at Harvard Medical School, Boston. He aims to develop clinical polygenic risk scores for six common diseases in the world. They include coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, type 2 diabetes mellitus, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer. The tests will then be used in clinical trials using point-of-care testing, which provides immediate results to patients.
4. Luca Pinello, Ph.D., at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Dr. Pinello is interested in disease-associated variants that lie in regions of the genome that do not code for genes. Many of these regions regulate the expression of genes and are known as regulatory elements. Dr. Pinello’s team of researchers will develop approaches to discover and understand how these regulatory elements function. Also, how mutations in these areas can contribute to disease.
5. Stacy Gray, M.D., at The City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, Duarte, California. Dr. Gray and the team are developing an interactive web-based, point-of-care tool for doctors and patients that will help health providers and patients better understand their genomic information, which will result in better healthcare delivery.
6. Timothy O’Connor, Ph.D., at the University of Maryland-Baltimore. Dr. O’Connor currently focuses on identifying genomic variants existing in specific ancestry populations. His team aims to classify small segments of identity by descent using genomic variants and to use the data to correlate mutational rates across various communities, including how these processes impact human health and disease.
NIH Genomic Innovator Awards – Award For Early Researchers – Under this, these scientists will receive a grant of approximately $500,000 per year over a five year project period.
