IHN Faculty Awarded the President’s Global Innovation Fund Grant

Institute of Human Nutrition (IHN) director Richard J. Deckelbaum, MD, and Nutritional and Metabolic Biology PhD program director Debra Wolgemuth, PhD, have been awarded the President’s Global Innovation Fund by Columbia University for their collaborative project, ''African Nutritional Sciences Research Consortium: Laboratory-based PhD Training in Nutritional and Agricultural Sciences in East Africa''.

The Fund awards grants for faculty members to leverage and engage the eight Columbia Global Centers. The program supports projects within and across these sites, in order to increase global opportunities for research, teaching, and service. The 11 projects receiving awards were selected by a review committee of senior faculty drawn from both the Morningside and medical campuses.

The projects selected in this round all make use of the network of Columbia Global Centers and provide opportunities for faculty and students to address pressing global issues. Projects receiving awards focus on a diverse array of topics, ranging from religion and populism to wildfires and deforestation to urban poverty. Many are highly collaborative, with faculty members working across University departments and schools, and partnering with other academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and research consortia.

These awards follow four previous rounds of grants from the President’s Global Innovation Fund that have supported 61 projects. Collectively, these projects play an essential role in realizing the potential of the Columbia Global Centers to create new opportunities for faculty and students, and in defining in tangible ways what it means for Columbia to explore new frontiers of knowledge.