Wayne State University has gathered up about $6 million in research grants since Thanksgiving, with the latest six-figure grant promising to reinvent the way the software programmers consume information.
Wayne State''s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is splitting a $500,000 with West Virginia University to development software that should help ease the information overload for computer programmers. The three-year project is expected to produce a tangible program by the second year and a finished product by the end of the third year.
"The idea is to build some software that when they touch a piece of code instead of looking at 1 million things, here are the 3-4 that are the most relevant," says
Andrian Marcus, an associate profession of computer science at Wayne State who is one of the project's principal investigators. "It's really about people making decisions."
Among the other grants are:
- The
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences received a five-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases of the National Institutes of Health for the study pain and stress management for fibromyalgia, a common and disabling pain condition. The college also received a $718,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study gene looping, a mechanism that regulates transcription of a number of genes including HIV proviral gene and BRCA1 gene linked to breast cancer.
- The
School of Medicine is using a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how alterations in the brain caused by inactivity may contribute to an individual's risk of cardiovascular disease. It also received a $228,000 national grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to investigate the mechanism of a hormone and related peptide in the battle against osteoporosis.
- The
College of Nursing received a $297,224 grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to develop and test a text messaging system that will remind Detroit-area African Americans with uncontrolled hypertension to take their blood pressure medication.
- The
College of Engineering will use a $190,000 grant from the Michigan Fitness Foundation to make the neighborhoods near Michigan K-8 schools more pedestrian- and bicyclist-friendly and educate K-8 students about traffic safety.
Source: Wayne State University and Andrian Marcus, an associate profession of computer science at Wayne State University
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at
SEMichiganStartup.com.
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