The university is now able to accelerate the progress of its researchers thanks to “virtual corridors of discovery” that it established about six years ago, according to Frank Cerra, who heads the university’s Academic Health Center. The corridors center on cardiovascular disease, diabetes, brain and nerve disorders, and a few other fields. Identifying them helped the university focus its resources on its strengths. Using the concept means encouraging collaboration between researchers across many disciplines and asking how all of the university’s relevant expertise can be brought to bear in solving a problem. Taylor’s early work on heart matrices, for example, relied on help from engineers and biomaterials scientists in the U’s Institute of Technology, Cerra says—people she likely wouldn’t have known about prior to the corridor concept.
The university’s portfolio of research grants has increased by about 8 percent annually for the past few years, he adds, and only a few schools in the country can make that claim: “We’re getting more awards” because the interdisciplinary programs and developments in the corridors “compete better in the national environment.”
—Phil Bolsta
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Dorothy Hatsukami
Director of the Masonic Cancer Center’s Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, Associate Director of the Masonic Cancer Center’s Prevention and Control Division
Karen Hsiao Ashe
Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, Director of the N. Bud Grossman Center for Memory Research and Care
Meri Firpo
Assistant Professor in the Stem Cell Institute and the Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology
