According to figures from the National Institute of Health and the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine is ranked ninth in the nation in total grant funding provided by NIH to U.S. medical schools in 2013.VUSM moved up four spots from its 2012 ranking and received $292,412,440 in 2013 to fund research on autism, Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson's disease, according to NIH figures."The availability of federal research funding for our nation's academic medical centers has been contracting over the last decade," Dr. Jeff Balser (pictured), vice chancellor for health affairs at VUSM, said in a release. "As a result, the national funding climate for research is fiercely competitive, and yet our investigators and their research teams continue to have unparalleled success."
Most recently, Vanderbilt researchers received a two-year $1.2 million NIH grant to study the metabolic and hormonal changes caused by bariatric surgery. The announcement of the grant, made in mid-December, followed NIH's renewing its contract, announced in September (read here), with the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program to allow the latter to continue work as one of the nation's Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units.
