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As an academic, research and health enterprise, discovery is at the core of the University of Kentucky’s mission — which is why research and scholarship serve as one of the five strategic objectives outlined in the 2015-2020 UK Strategic Plan. 

As one of only eight public institutions in the U.S. with colleges of Agriculture, Engineering, Medicine and Pharmacy on a single campus, UK is especially poised for groundbreaking discoveries and unique interdisciplinary collaboration.

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The unspoken pact among Wildcat fans to always "Bleed Blue" was suspended last week in the Pavilion A atrium of UK Chandler Hospital long enough for supporters to "Go Red." The American Heart Association's "Go Red for Women" day was Friday, Feb. 5 and dozens of supporters showed up dressed in red to promote awareness of women's heart health. "Sadly, we are seeing more women with heart disease at a younger age," said Dr. Gretchen Wells, Gill Heart Institute's director of Women's Heart Health and the event's featured speaker.

Please join Gina Vessels, SRAS Post Award Manager, on the second Thursday each month for one of our upcoming informational sessions on the monthly financial reports distributed by Sponsored Projects Accounting (SPA) for grant accounts. There will be a general review of the report structure and discussion of the information within the report, and there will be ample time for questions and discussion after the presentation.

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The laboratory of Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati of the University of Kentucky College of Medicine and an international team of researchers from Italy, United Kingdom, Japan, France, The Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Czech Republic, detail the discovery of a previously unrecognized function for antibodies in two articles this week in the inaugural issue of Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, a journal of the Nature Publishing Group. The immune system produces antibodies to recognize and bind to specific features found on pathogens such as bacteria and viruses.
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Over the last six months, videos of 22 biomedical researchers from the University of Kentucky, featured on the national website LabTV, have garnered 324,000 views.

LabTV.com features thousands of researchers working at dozens of leading universities, corporations, and the National Institutes of Health. In these videos medical researchers tell where they came from, how they chose their career, what they do each day in the lab, and why they love it.

The University of Kentucky Vice President for Research's Office will be offering several grant writing workshops in the next few weeks. The schedule is below.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Funding Opportunities/Types of Grant Applications
Erik Davidshofer
3:30-4:30
Wethington, Commons, Room 127

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The University of Kentucky College of Medicine recently hosted the eighth annual Postdoctoral Poster Presentation Session where three students received top honors for significant research in diverse medical science subjects. Nineteen posters from the basic and clinical sciences were presented in the atrium of the Biomedical Biological Sciences Research Building in December. The program is designed as a training exercise to prepare postdoctoral students for presenting research at conferences.

[From the NIH website]

[From the NIH website]

Stipends
Effective with all Kirschstein-NRSA awards made on or after October 1, 2015, the following annual stipend levels apply to all individuals receiving support through institutional research training grants or individual fellowships, including the Maximizing Access to Research Career (MARC) program.

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In the late 1990s, Donna Wilcock was exploring electrical activity in the epileptic brain as part of her undergraduate study in England, but her focus took an interesting turn as her studies into brain function deepened. "I began to wonder what, exactly, was going wrong in the brain as people developed dementia? What made them forget things?" said Wilcock.
Assistant Professor Joe Abisambra, researcher at the University of Kentucky Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, has demonstrated for the first time that tau impairs protein synthesis — a key component in memory loss. "Though the exact mechanisms leading to memory loss in tauopathies are not yet known, the scientific community has acknowledged for years that in Alzheimer’s disease brains, tau associates with ribosomes, the hub of protein production. " said Abisambra. Ribosomes are our cellular "factories," tasked with making the proteins essential to proper cellular function.

College of Medicine Graduate Student support – whether via a stipend for a fellowship assignment or a salary for a research assistant position – will increase to $25,000 annually for the 2016-17 academic year (from the current $23,500 amount).  Your Pre-Award GPS

Beginning on January 15, 2016, a new URL will be available to PIs for mobile access to their status information in eRA Commons.  The new URL will be:

 

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Reducing excessive medical costs associated with high hospital readmission rates is a pillar of health care reform. From 2007 to 2011, as many as 19 percent of patients in the United States returned to hospitals less than a month after discharge, accounting for an estimated $15 million in preventable hospitalization costs. In an effort to prevent adverse outcomes for chronically ill and aging patients and reduce the burden of cost on the government, Medicare providers have implemented transitional care management programs (TCMs) as a bundled component of Medicare payment plans.

Jan. 12 or Jan. 13: What’s New at the NIH? Requirements to Address Rigor and Transparency in Research

Please join Gina Vessels, SRAS Post Award Manager, for one of our informational sessions on the monthly financial reports distributed by Sponsored Projects Accounting (SPA) for grant accounts. There will be a general review of the report structure and discussion of the information within the report, and there will be ample time for questions and discussion after the presentation.

A Word about an “Honorarium” and the Proposal Budget:

New Subrecipient Commitment Form:

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In a recent article in the journal Nature Biotechnology, University of Kentucky Assistant Professor Nathan Vanderford and doctoral candidate Heather Norman-Burgdolf describe a course developed to help graduate students and postdoctoral fellows be prepared for the realities of the job market. Every year, doctoral graduates enter the job market in search of tenure-track professorship positions at universities throughout the world. Unfortunately, the number of new Ph.D.

Effective January 10, 2016, NIH has increased the salary cap from $183,300 to $185,100. 

 To read the full announcement, click here.