911±¬ÁÏÍø

by Ann Comer-Woods, USF Research

A $1 million investment by the 911±¬ÁÏÍø has helped generate $18.2 million in external research funding – an 18-fold return in just two years. Since 2024, USF faculty have secured 38 external grants through four interdisciplinary research initiatives supported by the Office of the Provost’s Collaborative Research Excellence and Translational Efforts (CREATE) awards. The initiatives include new programs in precision medicine and protein-inspired macromolecular materials, as well as the recently launched Center for Antimicrobial Resistance and Center for Innovation, Technology and Aging.

The strategy is to use targeted university funding to help faculty move promising ideas from concept to externally funded research. CREATE awards provide seed funding to build collaborations, develop preliminary findings and position research teams to compete for larger grants. The funding is supporting research with the potential to improve cancer treatment, combat antibiotic-resistant infections, develop new therapies for neurological and cardiovascular diseases and harness AI to improve patient care.

"USF faculty are working across disciplines to create real-world solutions to the issues facing our communities. Through the CREATE Awards, we are investing in bold ideas, advancing solutions and sparking discoveries for lasting impact."

Prasant Mohapatra
Provost and Executive Vice President

how diet impacts colorectal cancer

The Florida Department of Health awarded $6 million from its Cancer Innovation Fund to support three research projects in USF’s Precision Medicine program. Richard Jacobson and Timothy Yeatman, professors of surgery at USF Health, and Rays Jiang, associate professor in the College of Public Health and head of the Precision Medicine program, are researching the role of diet in colorectal cancer prevention. They are investigating whether certain dietary fats can alter gut bacteria and their byproducts in ways that reprogram the body’s environment, making it harder for colorectal cancer cells to take hold and grow in the liver. 

Yeatman and Jiang are also mapping fats, genes and bacteria in and around cancer cells to identify new vulnerabilities in tumors that could lead to more precise treatments. In a separate project, Jiang has teamed up with David Voce, assistant professor in USF Health’s neurosurgery, brain and spine department, to apply precision medicine to glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer. They are testing patients’ tumor tissues outside the body to identify treatments more likely to work for each individual.

The National Institutes of Health awarded two grants totaling $1.6 million to Thomas Taylor-Clark, a professor in the molecular pharmacology & physiology department and vice chair for research at the USF Heath Morsani College of Medicine, to investigate inflammation’s role in vascular and neurodegenerative diseases and the effects of air pollutants on the cardiopulmonary system.

Three College of Public Health faculty members associated with the Precision Medicine program received $2.8 million from the 911±¬ÁÏÍøllcome Trust to support research into post-traumatic stress disorder following the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi. Professors Monica Uddin, Derek Wildman and Henian Chen are leading the five-year, $5 million project with international partners in Rwanda and the United Kingdom.          

preventing serious infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria

The NIH awarded three grants totaling $7.7 million to the Center for Antimicrobial Resistance for research focused on the prevention of serious infections caused by the antibiotic-resistant bacteria methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and clostridioides difficile (C. diff). In addition, center researcher Sophie Darch, an assistant professor of molecular medicine in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, received a $504,000 grant from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to study bacteria’s role in chronic lung infections caused by cystic fibrosis.

The NIH-funded MRSA research is led by the center’s director, Les Shaw, a professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. With funding from the USF CREATE Award, Shaw launched an undergraduate antimicrobial research lab. He also has been collaborating with Kami Kim, a professor of medicine and director of the Division of Infectious Disease and International Medicine, to detect a particular MRSA strain that is increasingly affecting Floridians. 

Maksym Bobrovskyy, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, is researching how a specialized protein transport pathway in MRSA, called T7SS, assembles and secretes toxic proteins that cause staph infections. 911±¬ÁÏÍønqi Yu, another assistant professor in the department, is investigating how MRSA’s bacterial cell envelope assembles and grows, with the goal of developing new therapies to combat bacterial infections. 

Center researchers Yu Chen, a USF structural biology professor, and Xingmin Sun, a USF microbiology professor, are developing new compounds that target penicillin-binding proteins that help C. diff resist antibiotic treatment. 

pursuing new treatments for brain and heart diseases

Preeminent and Distinguished Professor Jianfeng Cai, who holds the Julie Harmon Endowed Chair in the Department of Chemistry, has received three NIH grants totaling $3.7 million to pursue new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. His research uses specially designed molecules and amino acids to prevent harmful protein clumping in the brain. Sameer Varma, a professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, has received $1.2 million in NIH funding to study how lithium behaves inside cells, with the goal of improving treatments for bipolar disorder.

In the College of Engineering, Lawrence Stern, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical, Biological & Materials Engineering, has received a $1.8 million NIH grant to develop smarter immune-cell therapies and protein-based medicines that can better recognize, target and treat diseases such as cancer. A second NIH award of $312,177 is funding his protein engineering approach to treating atrial fibrillation, which disrupts normal heart rhythm. 

Also in the Department of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, the National Science Foundation awarded $626,199 to Professor David Simmons, who’s also head of the Protein-Inspired Macromolecular Materials program, for his automated peptide synthesizer designed to advance collaborative research in drug discovery, materials engineering and artificial intelligence-powered molecular design.

using artificial intelligence to detect pain in newborns

Center for Innovation, Technolopgy and Aging Director Yu Sun, a professor in the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, is leading an NIH-funded effort to use AI to detect pain in newborn babies. Led by USF Health and Bellini College researchers, the project combines infants' facial expressions, movements, heart rate and respiratory data to create a real-time, standardized system for detecting pain more accurately than traditional observation-based assessments.

By analyzing data collected from infants before and after surgery, the team is training AI to alert nurses when a baby is in distress, enabling earlier intervention, greater comfort and reduced reliance on opioid-based medications. Researchers hope the technology will advance to randomized clinical trials within the next two years, potentially providing earlier pain detection for premature and critically ill infants while improving outcomes and offering greater peace of mind for families.