About the Office of Research

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The Office of Research works to accelerate the growth of research in all UT Health Science Center colleges and at all major locations. It promotes innovative research opportunities and provides state-of-the-art infrastructure to meet the needs of our researchers, positioning them to compete successfully for extramural funding.

The Office of Research manages nine institutionally supported and subsidized core facilities located on the UT Health Science Center campus, including the Lab Animal Care Unit, the Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, the Molecular Resource Center, the Molecular Bioinformatics Core, the Flow Cytometry and Cell Sorting Core, the Proteomics and Metabolomics Core, the Research Histology Core, the Medicinal Chemistry Core, and the Advanced Imaging Core. These core facilities serve investigators based at UT Health Science Center, LeBonheur Children's Hospital, the Regional One Medical Center, and the University of Memphis (the greater Memphis area), as well as several external customers from around the U.S. and the world.

In keeping with its mission to move the university into the ranks of the top biomedical research institutions, the Office of Research oversees the development and implementation of UT Health Science Center's comprehensive research strategy. The Office of Research reported annual grant and contract awards for FY23 totaled over $100 million. The faculty of all six colleges and four campuses broke records in a number of categories, including proposal count by fiscal year and quarter.

Our strong infrastructure allowed the UT Health Science Center research enterprise to remain fully functional during the pandemic, despite the reduced campus presence. Increased staffing, improved resources, and new streamlined and automated processes allowed researchers to successfully adapt, and to advance their projects, despite the physical restrictions in place on all campuses. Specific examples include:

• New rapid review processes for proposals submitted to the Institutional Review Board and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee
• Enhanced communication of research resources and funding opportunities 
• Writing assistance to improve the quality of scientific manuscripts and grant proposals, via the creation of the Office of Scientific Writing

Our growth has also fueled by a number of initiatives the Office of Research developed to encourage collaboration among researchers statewide, nationally and globally. Some examples of winning strategies are:

• Creating fertile ground for large interdisciplinary grants by developing new research institutes and consortia, such as the Tennessee Population Health Consortium and the Institute for the Study of Host Pathogen Systems (ISHPS). The ISHPS alone received a multiyear national grant for nearly $23 million in 2017. In 2021, the Office of Research collaborated with the UT Research Foundation to secure approximately $1.2 million in funding to start the Tennessee Population Health Consortium.
• Recruiting faculty to establish research institutes and centers. Colleen Jonsson, PhD, was hired in 2017 to direct UT Health Science Center’s Regional Biocontainment Lab and subsequently created and directs ISHPS. Dr. Jonsson, an Endowed Van Vleet Chair of Excellence in Virology, also played a lead role in the UT Health Science Center’s response to the pandemic, converting the RBL to a COVID-19 research facility in early 2020. Her efforts over the last three years have been instrumental in helping the UT Health Science Center reach new heights in national recognition and funding, earning her a UT President’s Award in 2021. In 2017, Kenneth Ataga, PhD, an internationally recognized expert clinician and researcher in sickle cell disease, was recruited to direct the UT Health Science Center Center for Sickle Cell Disease.
• Providing new grant intramural support to investigators in need of gathering further data to strengthen resubmission of unfunded grants.