The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston recently received a $4.2 million award from the National Institutes of Health to help expand scientific training and research to improve the rehabilitation and treatment of people with disabilities.  Dr. Kenneth Ottenbacher, director of the Division of Rehabilitation Sciences at UTMB and lead investigator on the study, talked to Guidry News Service about the project.  Listen

“My research interests are in rehabilitation outcomes, outcomes for individuals with disabilities and impairments,” Dr. Ottenbacher said.  He explained that the NIH grant is a career development award to develop a team of researchers who will work with mentors at their educational institutions.

“It’s an Institutional-K award,” he explained.  “Instead of the grant going to an individual to develop their career it goes to an institution.”

Dr. Ottenbacher said that a consortium of universities - UTMB, the University of Florida and the University of Southern California - is working on the project.

“The purpose of the grant isn’t to build research capacity just at UTMB, it’s really to build research capacity in these fields at a national level,” he said, explaining that UTMB is the lead institution in the consortium. 

“The function of this grant, really, is to provide release time for these early career faculty, so that they can develop their research programs and to pair them with mentors or with research teams at established institutions that will help them to be successful in getting their research programs up and going; and eventually hopefully getting their own funding and being successful and going on to become the mentors to the next generation of rehabilitation scientists,” Dr. Ottenbacher said.  “We’re very, both honored and excited to have this grant and to have this partnership with the University of Florida and the University of Southern California."

To read the UTMB news release Click Here