Grant will boost women’s health research

A research project that explores new ways that hormones affect the brain, led by Dr. Meharvan Singh, associate professor of pharmacology and neuroscience, was funded through the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the National Institutes of Health. This four-year, $5.6 million grant is the third Program Project Grant (PPG) for the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, placing the Health Science Center among the few institutions in the nation to have been awarded three such grants within a single department. The grant also puts the department in the nation’s top 10 percent for research grant dollars per faculty member, and the top 20 percent for total research grant dollars of all research centers.

Dr. Singh says this project reflects the Health Science Center’s strong collaborative environment. PPGs are awarded to support research projects involving a number of investigators with research activities and expertise that complement one another. Others involved in the project include:

• Dr. James Simpkins, chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience
• Dr. Peter Koulen, professor of pharmacology and neuroscience
• Dr. Laszlo Prokai, Robert A. Welch Professor of molecular biology and immunology
• Dr. Katalin Prokai-Tatrai, research associate professor of pharmacology and neuroscience
• Dr. ShaoHua Yang, assistant professor of pharmacology and neuroscience
• Shande Chen, associate professor of biostatistics
• Dr. Dominique Toran-Allerand at Columbia University in New York

In addition to this new NIH-funded study, Dr. Singh is leading a new research project funded by a grant from the Alzheimer’s Association to study how the hormone progesterone influences the levels and regulation of a family of proteins that are altered by Alzheimer’s disease. And, as part of another project funded through the NIA, Dr. Singh and his community-based collaborator, Stan Hall, received a Small Business Technology Transfer grant to develop a diagnostic test to assess the risks associated with androgen therapy.