Tuesday, January 13, 2004

WRITER: Phil Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
SOURCE: Dan Colley, 706/542-4112, dcolley@uga.edu

ELLISON MEDICAL FOUNDATION AWARDS GRANT OF $275,400 TO UGA’S CENTER FOR TROPICAL AND EMERGING GLOBAL DISEASES

A new five-year grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation will provide international research training opportunities of two-to-three months for University of Georgia undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral scholars.

It will also bring advanced international trainees to Athens for similar research opportunities, according to Dr. Dan Colley, director of UGA’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, which is the grant recipient. Colley is also a professor of microbiology.

“This funding will provide unique opportunities for junior- and senior-level trainees to pursue international research projects in the highly productive laboratories of our collaborators in locations such as Kenya, Argentina, Peru and Brazil, among many such locations,” said Colley. “The chance for students and post-doctoral fellows to pursue research in countries where such diseases such as malaria, Chagas disease, schistosomiasis and others are endemic will be invaluable to them as they make future career choices.”

The undergraduate component of the program will be implemented through UGA’s Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities as a portion of their Summer Research Fellowship Program. Through this joint arrangement at least one UGA undergraduate will be competitively awarded a fellowship that will include a stipend, air fare and subsistence, to pursue research in the laboratory of an overseas collaborator of a scientist in the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases (CTEGD).

The UGA graduate student and post-doctoral scholar part of the program will be implemented by the CETGD and provides its graduate students and post-doctoral scholars with research training opportunities of up to three months in the international laboratories of Center collaborators.

“The international trainee program offers advanced trainees, in the many international laboratories that collaborate with our Center’s faculty, opportunities to spend 2-3 month in research training in our laboratories at UGA,” said Colley.

Instructions and regulations concerning these fellowships, which will provide air fare and subsistence costs, can be found on the CTEGD website (http://www.ctegd.uga.edu). Information regarding undergraduate qualifications and the application process can be found at the CURO or CTEGD websites (http://www.uga.edu/honors/curo/ and http://www.ctegd.uga.edu).

The Ellision Medical Foundation, established and supported by Lawrence J. Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp., supports innovative research and training in two largely under-funded areas of biomedical research: aging and global infectious diseases. UGA faculty have competed successfully for two other Ellison Medical Foundation awards, one to Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar in Aging, Dr. Daniel Promislow, in the department of genetics and the other to Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Global Infectious Diseases, Dr. Pejman Rohani, assistant professor of ecology.