The National Institutes of Health awarded the Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center at the University of Arkansas $11.2 million in Phase 2 funding. The funding rewards the successful completion of Phase 1 and is a strong validation of work done over the first five years of the center’s existence.
The AIMRC was created to deepen understanding of the role of cell and tissue metabolism in disease, human development and repair processes. Understanding the mechanisms of metabolism could have implications for arresting the spread of cancer, slowing muscular degeneration from aging or hastening wound healing. Clarifying metabolism’s role in different disease states could also drive new treatment approaches to conditions like breast cancer, diabetes and obesity, all of which severely impact the state of Arkansas.
But conducting basic and translational research is only the outward-facing component of AIMRC’s mission. The internal component is the recruitment and professional development of early-career faculty through financial support and formal mentoring from more established faculty. Early-stage faculty pursuing research in the broad area of metabolism receive significant startup funding to help set up their labs. These early-stage faculty can also compete for designation for Research Project Leader designation, which comes with three years of research funding and participation in a structured mentoring program designed to strengthen their applications for major National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grants.
The AIMRC has established three state-of-the-art research core facilities in bioenergetics, imaging and data science to enable Research Project Leaders, as well as affiliated faculty across campus, to conduct experiments and collect data to advance their research program. Ideally, they “graduate” when they secure their first major grant. Graduates can then act as mentors for the next class of Research Project Leaders.
“Phase 2 gives us the opportunity to expand, both in terms of the number of faculty and in contributing to the research vision of campus,” said Narasimhan Rajaram, director of the AIMRC.
To date, AIMRC-affiliated researchers have been awarded $52.5 million in external funding, with almost $20 million of that funding generated by early-career faculty. The center currently brings together 61 faculty from eight departments and five colleges. Rajaram intends to use this foundation to level up grant support during Phase 2, with the goal of earning $75-80 million in external research funding over the next five years.
While the core work of recruiting, developing and launching young faculty into successful careers remains the same, he thinks the growing corps of affiliated faculty will make the center more competitive for large, collaborative and multi-disciplinary grants.
“Now, compared to 2021, we have plenty of individual faculty members who are very successful. And the nice thing is it cuts across colleges. Now we can go back to previously successful faculty and say, ‘let’s form teams and go after larger grants.’ I think individual grants give you a slow but steady increase in research funding, which is good. But it’s team science that will really get us to where we want to go as a university,” Rajaram said, referencing Chancellor Charles Robinson’s 150 Forward goal of the university reaching $500 million in research expenditures by 2032.
While Phase 2 funding provides for the continued recruitment of early-career faculty, it also gives Rajaram’s team the latitude to recruit already established faculty outside of the U of A, perhaps to bolster a research area or round out the expertise on a multidisciplinary team.
AIMRC will be eligible for Phase 3 funding in five years, at which time the goal is to be self-sustaining.
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