A new five-year grant of $275,400 from the Ellison Medical Foundation will provide international research training opportunities of two to three months for UGA undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.
It will also bring advanced international trainees to Athens for similar research opportunities, according to Dan Colley, director of UGA’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, the grant recipient. Colley is 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 other locations,” says Colley. “The chance for students and postdoctoral fellows to pursue research in countries where such diseases 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 the Summer Research Fellowship Program. Through this joint arrangement at least one UGA undergraduate will be competitively awarded a fellowship, including a stipend, airfare and subsistence, to pursue research in the laboratory of an overseas collaborator of a scientist in the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases.
The graduate student and postdoctoral scholar part of the program, to be implemented by the center, will provide students and postdocs 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 two to three months in research training in our laboratories at UGA,” says Colley.
The Ellison Medical Foundation supports innovative research and training in two largely underfunded areas of biomedical research: aging and global infectious diseases. UGA faculty have competed successfully for two other Ellison Foundation awards, one to Daniel Promislow in the department of genetics and the other to Pejman Rohani in the Institute of Ecology.