February 18, 2011

Mizzou Advantage awarded more than $1.4 million to 38 proposals Tuesday.

“What exactly the project is, varies so much from one to another,” Mizzou Advantage Program Coordinator Meg Phillips said. “Sometimes it’s a research project, and then one of them is to get a new television channel started. It really widely varies from one to another.”

The program is a collection of five initiatives, ranging from “Food for the Future” to “Sustainable Energy,” all with the intent of increasing MU’s visibility, stature and impact in higher education. Tuesday’s grants will support projects that fall under these five programs, Phillips said.

“The proposals were scored on a variety of things — how well they fit in to the Mizzou Advantage, if they would raise the stature and impact of the university and the intellectual merit,” Phillips said. “If the proposal was clear, well put-together and the goals were doable, it was definitely considered.”

The selection committee for the grants consisted of 19 people from different areas of campus, many of who were members of Mizzou Advantage, Phillips said.

If a proposal was selected, it received one of two grants: a network or a seed grant.

Network grants awarded up to $20,000 with the intent of gathering people with similar skill sets to use the money to accomplish their goals. Fifteen network grants were given.

Seed grants are intended to fund a beginning project that will, upon completion, lead to larger things, Phillips said. Of the grants, 23 were seed grants.

One of the awarded proposals will use sophisticated technologies such as nanotechnology to provide future advances in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Nanoparticle-mediated therapy techniques treat the cancer at cellular level processes are consequently carry the potential to cure metastatic breast cancer. Mizzou Advantage awarded the team involved with this proposal – consisting of Raghu Kannan, Kattesh Katti, Kent Gates and Cathy Cutler – with $50,000.

“I am extremely thankful to the Mizzou Advantage program for providing me with this grant,” Kannan said. “We will utilize this money to validate the hypothesis presented in the grant.”

The Food Dialogue Center project was also awarded $50,000.

“There’s a ton of different polarizing aspects of food production right now,” project team member Ray Massey said. “What we wanted to do is see if we could create a center where people could go to that would have research-based information about all of this. We want to be a one-stop shop for unbiased information that covers all of the different perspectives of what is becoming a polarizing conversation in America.”

Mizzou Advantage was originally slated to give out $1.5 million in grants, but because of MU’s budget shortfalls, Mizzou Advantage contributed $4 million to MU. This will help cushion the $12.7 million expected drop in MU funding because of Gov. Jay Nixon’s budget proposal.

“Obviously, the entire university is going to be burdened with the cuts in state appropriations,” Phillips said. “Mizzou Advantage is just bearing its share of the struggle.”

Chancellor Brady Deaton provided Mizzou Advantage an extra $400,000 to fund proposals with potential for major external collaborations and major components from the arts and humanities. An extra 10 projects were funded because of his contributions.

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