Penn State's Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences is requesting proposals for a new "Life at All Scales" seed grant program that will afford researchers opportunities to explore the capabilities of the High-Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Core Facility. Proposals are due Sept. 30.
The grant is open to Penn State faculty members - tenured, tenure track or fixed term - who are Huck co-hires, members of Huck institutes or centers, or faculty of Huck Interdisciplinary Graduate Degree programs. Applicants must hold an appointment of half-time or greater at University Park or any Penn State Commonwealth Campus, including the College of Medicine, and have not previously conducted research in the MRI Core Facility. Recipients will be given 20 hours of consulting time and up to 40 hours of instrumentation time.
"Our goal is for researchers who have never used this facility previously to use this funding to explore how they can incorporate this powerful technology into their research," said Craig Praul, director of Huck's core facilities. "We hope that these seed funds will allow investigators to collect data that can be the foundation for externally funded research."
Instruments at the MRI Core Facility can generate high resolution three-dimensional data of organs, tissues, and internal structures of animals and plants. Imaging of live subjects to capture rapid changes in structures, such as beating hearts, water flow, or metabolic profiles within tissues as well as any other common MRI technique are available.
Previous research projects conducted in the MRI Core Facility include examining lipid storage, water uptake, and water flow in seeds and plant tissue; characterizing fat deposition during wound healing in rabbits; awake functional MRI (fMRI) of mice and rats;, variation in bone and brain structures in mice models of human disease; and 3D reconstruction of internal tissues of insects like hawkmoths. The facility also houses micro computed tomography (microCT) scanners that complement the MRI systems to produce true multimodal imaging data.
Full details are available on the grant's InfoReady page, and more information about the MRI Core Facility, including a video overview of its capabilities, is available on the Huck Institutes website.
