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Notable contributions and programs

• Wayne State University faculty received nearly $32 million in research grants under the federal government’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act program. The 63 grants include 57 totaling more than $24 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the second largest number of NIH grants in the state for this program.

• In 2010, TechTown, the Wayne State University research and technology park, will become home to Michigan’s first stem cell commercialization lab. With the opening of the lab, Detroit and Michigan are poised to assume leadership in research in this field of increasing importance to the biomedical industry and health-care practice. As part of the University Research Corridor (URC), Wayne State also will co-host the 2010 World Stem Cell Summit in October.

• TechTown is participating in FastTrac to the Future, a multimillion-dollar grant-funded project of the New Economy Initiative and the Kauffman Foundation that promises to create 400 new companies in each of the next three years to boost Southeast Michigan’s economy.

• Jeffrey Stanley, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences, has received a $2.7 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health of NIH to track the development of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in the brains of children and teens in the hope of developing more effective therapies.

• With support from a $5.7 million grant from NIH, Wayne State will launch a child-focused center aimed at preventing and treating obesity in African-American children and adolescents. The intervention project will be led by Sylvie Naar-King, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics in the School of Medicine, and Kai-Lin Catherine Jen, PhD, professor and chair of nutrition and food science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

• The College of Nursing has been awarded approximately $2 million in grants for initiatives to alleviate the state’s nursing shortage. The Michigan Nursing Corps addresses the key obstacle to educating greater numbers of nurses — a shortage of faculty — by preparing additional educators to train new nurses.

• Wayne State’s alliance with the University of Michigan and Michigan State University in the University Research Corridor continues to pay off for Michigan’s economy. The three institutions account for 94 percent of all federal research dollars coming into the state. The URC is the youngest of only seven such consortia in the country, but already exceeds half the other six on key research and development benchmarks, notably $1.4 billion in annual outside research funding. The URC institutions have an annual economic impact on Michigan of $14.5 billion.

• In 2009, the College of Engineering opened the Marvin I. Danto Engineering Development Center, a $28 million, 82,500-square-foot facility built with a sustainable energy and environmental design. The center will be used for traditional university research and will provide engineering services to help companies accelerate their own research and development activities.

• In 2009, the School of Medicine opened its Richard J. Mazurek, M.D. Medical Education Commons for students, faculty and researchers. The $35 million facility features state of the art classrooms and laboratories, the latest patient simulation technology, and is designed to be the nucleus of all programs at the nation’s largest single-campus medical school.

• Wayne State received a $0.6 million grant from the Kresge Foundation to support the university’s Center for Excellence and Equity in Mathematics and promote the continued success of its nationally recognized Math Corps program. The center’s mission is to improve the quality of K-12 and introductory college-level mathematics courses, and to use math to help students from inner cities and underrepresented minority groups to recognize and capitalize on positive educational and lifetime opportunities.

• The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke awarded Wayne State a five-year, $6.25 million research consortium grant for an international project to develop a better understanding of and new treatments for forms of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT). CMT is one of the most common genetic nerve diseases, causing progressive muscle weakness. Michael Shy, M.D., professor of neurology in the School of Medicine, is leading the study. Wayne State has one of the largest and most comprehensive CMT programs in the world; since 1996, the university has evaluated more than 1,200 patients with CMT from more than 21 countries.

• As part of President Barack Obama’s plan to help revitalize the automotive industry, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded Wayne State a $5 million grant to provide an electric vehicle engineering education and workforce training program.

• WDET 101.9 FM, a public service of Wayne State, has launched a program called STAR, an acronym for Support The Arts, to provide support to nonprofit cultural organizations in Southeast Michigan. The program features monthly spotlights, through free on-air promotion and announcements, of two organizations that promote and nurture the artistic landscape of metro Detroit. The program is designed to help cultural organizations with smaller budgets reach a wider audience than otherwise would be possible.

• Melissa Runge-Morris, M.D., professor and acting director of the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, received $0.4 million from NIH to investigate the effect of PCBs in the progression of breast cancer. PCBs are a class of chemical compound that for many years was used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications and which may still be present in materials produced before their 1979 ban.