Moving Research Forward

The Virginia Commonwealth University Presidential Research Incentive Program has announced its inaugural round of internal funding awards totaling more than $908,000 to support faculty engaged in new, emerging or continuing research.

Twenty-two awards supporting projects across the institution from medicine, allied health, education, life sciences, engineering, dentistry, business, pharmacy and various disciplines in the College of Humanities and Sciences were funded in this first round.

“This first round of grants signals VCU’s commitment to putting action to words,” said VCU President Michael Rao, Ph.D. “VCU is committed to recognition as a research university on all levels and across disciplines. The VCU Presidential Research Incentive Program will provide new opportunities for VCU faculty to expand their scholarship and better position them for major external research support.”

The VCU Presidential Research Incentive Program, or PRIP, received 82 applications from schools and colleges across VCU. Of the 82 applications, 32 were recommended for funding to the PRIP Review Committee. Ultimately, 22 different projects involving 27 faculty members received funding.

“The faculty response to the program was robust. Applications covered a wide range of topics reflecting the growing base and diversity of VCU's research enterprise,” said Francis Macrina, Ph.D., VCU’s vice president for research.

In its first round, this unique program has brought together investigators interested in common research paths from across schools and within departments to share expertise and knowledge.

For co-collaborators Bryce McLeod, Ph.D., associate professor with the Department of Psychology, and Kevin Sutherland, Ph.D., associate professor with the School of Education and VCU Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development, the award helps launch a unique partnership that bridges schools and disciplines to develop treatment integrity measures for intervention research in classroom settings.

“Bryce and I bring different things to the table,” Sutherland said. “One great thing about VCU is that people are interested in doing good science, good work. We have different backgrounds, but have knowledge of what the other does, and we each bring our own expertise. Our hope is that working together may result in something creative and impactful.”

McLeod, who has expertise in the science and measurement of treatment integrity, and Sutherland, who has expertise in classroom-based interventions for problem behavior, are developing treatment integrity measures for use in classroom settings. These measures are designed to gauge how much and how well a teacher is delivering new behavioral interventions such as praising a child for performance of a desired behavior, preparing a child for transitions from classroom to playground or setting up classroom rules and reminding the child of those rules.

By measuring how often and how well teachers are implementing the intervention, researchers like McLeod and Sutherland can determine both how the interventions may be improved upon and more accurately measure intervention effects on children’s developmental outcomes.

“There is a big focus here at VCU, and many funding agencies, to develop interventions that can be delivered in real-world settings – in the actual classrooms and in community-based psychotherapy service centers,” McLeod said. “In order to do that, we need to be able to take what we’ve developed in laboratory settings and adapt them for use in these community settings. The treatment integrity measures will help us achieve this important goal.”

Similar collaborations have been forged among departmental colleagues, as in the case of Sandra Welch, Ph.D.; S. Stevens Negus, Ph.D.; Laura Sim-Selley, Ph.D.; and Dana E. Selley, Ph.D., in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, who will use PRIP funds to gather more preliminary data for their research project.

Ultimately, the goal is to use the data they gather through the support of this award to help position the research for major external funding.

The team is researching the development of safer analgesics with reduced abuse liability. They have identified a potential new use in analgesia of a clinically active drug known as FTY720, already in phase III fast-track clinical trials with the Food and Drug Administration for multiple sclerosis.

Welch and the team have already published preliminary findings that FTY720 is a potent analgesic, an effect mediated in part by activation of natural endogenous opioid systems in our bodies. Further, they have shown that the combination of the opioid morphine in combination with very low inactive doses of FTY720 will enhance the effects of morphine.

“The PRIP Award provides the basic funding for more detailed testing of FTY720 and other drugs of its class, thus providing increased preliminary data that we all require for our submissions of RO1s to the National Institutes of Health,” Welch said.

“Our hope is to parlay the PRIP Award into three major grant proposals from which both VCU and our personal research programs will be recognized,” she said.

Welch, who was honored to have her team’s effort selected for funding, described PRIP as “far-reaching, forward-thinking and proactive towards the research here at the university – it’s an excellent idea.”

McCleod, who has been successful in earning external grant funding from the National Institute of Mental Health for previous work, has found the preparations for PRIP valuable.

“The PRIP award supports good ideas and provides the means for them to grow into fundable projects,” McLeod said. “It’s difficult to go from zero to 100 without some intermediary process that allows researchers to conduct pilot work. I think the PRIP award is an ideal vehicle for that.”  

“The award allows us the time to collect data to help position the work for larger grants - that’s what we need as we continue our research at VCU.”

Thirty-two applications came from the School of Medicine, 14 from the College of Humanities and Sciences, 10 from the School of Engineering, seven from the School of Business, six from the School of Allied Health, five from the Life Sciences, three from the School of Education, three from the School of Dentistry and two from the School of Pharmacy.

Faculty grants were awarded based on a two-step review process involving the schools and the VCU Research Development Advisory Council. The first stage was a school level review, in which each school received applications from its faculty and established a rigorous review process that used the PRIP Review Committee (PRC) selection criteria, which centered on the scholarly merit of the project, the potential for extramural funding leading from this project and the contribution of the project to the scholarly trajectory/line of inquiry of the investigator. Each school forwarded to the PRC those applications receiving the highest ratings at the unit level and for which there was a funding commitment from the dean.

PRIP dollars provide 60 percent of the award and the faculty member’s department and/or school provided 40 percent. The funding period is 18 months.

For more information on the program: http://www.research.vcu.edu/vpr/prip/index.htm.

For the 2010 PRIP awardees, visit http://www.news.vcu.edu/pdf/PRIP-awardees.pdf.