For Immediate Release: December 15, 1999
Contact: Hali Wickner (603) 650-1520
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Dartmouth Medical School Receives $3.4 Million from Howard Hughes Medical Institute for New Genetics Department
HANOVER, NH -- John C. Baldwin, M.D., dean of Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) and vice president for health affairs of Dartmouth College, announced that DMS has been awarded $3.4 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to support the medical school's new Department of Genetics.
The competitive four-year grant will serve as a cornerstone for the broad-based endeavor that Baldwin initiated to develop a focus and a formalized academic community for Dartmouth in the burgeoning field of genetics. The Dartmouth College Board of Trustees, at its November meeting, approved Baldwin's appointment of pioneering DMS geneticist Jay Dunlap, Ph.D., as the inaugural chair and professor of genetics.
"We are deeply gratified that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the nation's foremost biomedical research organizations, has looked favorably on our proposal for genetics at Dartmouth," said Baldwin, the principal investigator for the grant. "Genetics is the vanguard of molecular biology, and its intersection with computational advances is perhaps the most compelling aspect of science in the new millennium. It is the quintessence of the explosion of knowledge about basic mechanisms of normal and abnormal biology. We stand on the threshold of transforming medicine from palliation to ascertainment of wellness and curative approaches to disease."
Baldwin stressed that the new medical school department will bridge basic and disease-oriented research, drawing on the patient care programs at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the biological science, information technology and engineering resources of Dartmouth College, as well as the expertise of other medical school departments.
"The grant is a sterling validation of our vision for a world class department that connects the many facets of genetics at Dartmouth," Dunlap said. "We will use this HHMI funding primarily to support the recruitment of junior faculty, as well as to build research in genetic model systems, particularly in vertebrate genetics including transgenic mouse studies."
The new genetics department will be headquartered on the seventh floor of the medical school's Remsen-Vail complex, where state-of the art laboratories are being constructed.
The grant to Dartmouth Medical School is the sixth largest award that 41 of the nation's 126 medical schools received from HHMI to help find new ways to combine basic biomedical research and clinical treatment of patients.
