UTSA, UT Health Science Center announce SALSI research excellence award winners

(Oct. 20, 2014) -- The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health Science Center) have awarded $600,000 to two groups of researchers to kick-start new collaborative research projects. The research projects, in medical mycology and big data, will improve society by contributing to the development of new treatments and technologies, respectively.

UTSA and the UT Health Science Center are awarding this Fiscal Year 2015 Clusters in Research Excellence funding through the San Antonio Life Sciences Institute (SALSI), a joint initiative that aims to raise the international research profiles of both institutions by encouraging collaboration in targeted research areas. Each group of researchers will receive $300,000.

The first research cluster will explore medical mycology challenges. The frequency of fungal infections has increased dramatically in recent years, and the infections carry unacceptably high mortality rates. Together, UTSA and UT Health Science Center researchers will work to advance the ability of clinicians to diagnose and treat fungal infections. Over the next year, they will work to better understand and identify fungal species, and to develop new tools to diagnose, prevent and treat fungal infections.

Researchers in the medical mycology cluster include UTSA professors Jose Lopez-Ribot, Pharm.D. (biology) and Floyd Wormley (biology) in the South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and professors Thomas Patterson, M.D. (medicine/infectious diseases) and Nathan Wiederhold, Pharm.D. (pathology) in the UT Health Science Center School of Medicine.

With their joint SALSI funding, UTSA and the Health Science Center will also establish a medical data analytics and visualization cluster. These researchers will develop a complete set of data analytics tools for computation, visualization and digital patient archives. Specifically, they will focus on the challenge of interpreting big data in the medical and health care fields.

Researchers in the big data cluster include UTSA professors Yusheng Feng (mechanical engineering) and Yufei Huang (electrical engineering) and UTSA assistant professors John Quarles (computer science) and Krystel Castillo (mechanical engineering) as well as UT Health Science Center chair John Calhoon, M.D. (cardiothoracic surgery), ultrasound director Craig Sisson, M.D. (emergency medicine), professors Edward Sako, M.D. (surgery) and Yidong Chen (epidemiology and biostatistics) and assistant professor Laura Rosenkranz (medicine/gastroenterology).

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