HuGER

One of the most highly regarded researchers worldwide in childhood lung diseases, Fernando Martinez, has accepted the position of interim director for the BIO5 Institute at The University of Arizona (UA) beginning February 9, 2009.

Dr. Martinez is the Swift-McNear Professor of Pediatrics, the director of the UA College of Medicine’s Arizona Respiratory Center, and a long time BIO5 faculty member. He and current BIO5 director Vicki Chandler served together as interim co-directors for BIO5 before Dr. Chandler was named director in 2004, and he has been a member of the BIO5 faculty advisory committee for the past five years. Dr. Martinez began his affiliation with the UA in 1984.

“I am very grateful for this unique opportunity to take my commitment to interdisciplinary research in life sciences to its highest level. There are few other examples in this country of a research institute in which bioengineers, biostatisticians, basic biological scientists,” plant geneticists and biomedical researchers collaborate and pursue their common goals, says Dr. Martinez.

“In these first seven years, all of us at BIO5 have learned to work together to find better treatments for human disease and more abundant and nutritious foods for humanity. I am totally committed to further expanding these efforts, and to continue supporting in any way we can the development of a strong bioscience industry that will provide better jobs and a better future for the people of Arizona.”

The National Institutes of Health has awarded The University of Arizona a five-year, $1.4 million grant to create a multidisciplinary "training ground" that will give student researchers the expertise to better understand how genes and the environment interact to affect human health – skills that could one day improve our ability to treat and prevent diseases such as diabetes and asthma.

The NIH-funded HuGER (Human Genes and the Environment Research) grant draws on the UA's expertise in multiple key areas: environmental and public health, science, engineering, population and functional genomics/genetics, computational biology and statistics/bioinformatics.

Seventeen faculty members in six UA colleges will train and mentor the program's students, initially recruiting four graduate and three post-doctoral students by 2009. The project is a natural fit for the UA, which has a long history of collaboration across departments; and for the BIO5 Institute, which was created to facilitate collaborations.

"We're really well placed because of the strengths that already exist on campus," says co-principal investigator Terrence J. Monks, professor and head of the department of pharmacology and toxicology, as well as a BIO5 member. Participating UA colleges include Pharmacy, Agriculture and Life Sciences, Medicine, Engineering, Science and Public Health.

BIO5 will administer HuGER, which is co-funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Human Genome Institute.