UCSF School of Dentistry Leads Nation in NIH Funding with School Record $26 Million

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UCSF School of Dentistry again led the nation in funding from the 2023 National Institutes of Health (NIH) among dental schools.

In 2023, UCSF Dentistry’s 63 awards garnered over 26 million dollars in total funding, the most ever for UCSF Dentistry. This accomplishment underscored the institution's dedication to excellence and its ability to attract substantial support for its initiatives. While nearly half of the School’s NIH funding is from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, half comes from other NIH institutes and centers, including one-fifth from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities.

"UCSF School of Dentistry faculty and trainees have sustained growing their research programs by proposing cutting-edge research studies ranging from cells to communities with tremendous success in obtaining peer-reviewed NIH funding. It’s also especially noteworthy that some of the largest research awards are team science projects focusing on major NIH initiatives – clearly a harbinger of future scientific pursuits” said Stuart Gansky, DrPH, associate dean for research and Lee Hysan Chair of Oral Epidemiology.

Organization	City	State	Country	Awards	Funding
University of California, San Francisco	San Francisco	CA	United States	63	$26,814,987
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor	Ann Arbor	MI	United States	40	$20,376,426
New York University	New York	NY	United States	38	$19,945,857
University of Pennsylvania	Philadelphia	PA	United States	57	$16,923,549
University of Southern California	Los Angeles	CA	United States	26	$16,516,758

UCSF Dentistry Successful in Securing New Grants and Competitive Renewals

Nine new projects received funding in 2023, the largest is “Clinical and Translational Research Innovation in Dental Schools (ClinTrain-RIDeS)” highlighted in a recent UCSF story. The five-year, four-million-dollar grant is focused on building clinical research capacity in oral health by training UCSF dental students, residents and faculty, as well as collaborating partners across Northern California.

Two researchers received the highly competitive Maximizing Investigator Research Awards (MIRAs) for Early-Stage Investigators:

Matthew Kutys, PhD, is researching how normal genes and cell organization work together in tissue development and regeneration, but result in disease when dysregulated. His award entitled “Decoding cortical Notch signaling and morphogenic instruction at cell-cell interfaces” develops new tools to explore how physical interactions affect Notch receptor behavior.

Erica Hutchins, PhD, researches epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), a fundamental process essential to tissue formation that can be aberrantly activated in adult tissue to lead to cancer or other diseases.

Her newly-funded project “Mechanisms of RNA turnover during the epithelial-mesenchymal transition” uses neural crest cells to improve understanding of this important cellular mechanism.

The UCSF Oral and Craniofacial Sciences (OCS) training grant (NIDCR T32 DDS-PhD, PhD, and postdoctoral fellows), led by Pamela Den Besten, DDS, MS, was renewed for its 27th through 31st years of funding. The OCS program provides multidisciplinary education and training to address questions of biological relevance to dental, oral and craniofacial science, and clinical care.

“Our research community delves into the fundamentals of biology, pathology, and etiology, revealing novel findings that challenge the way we think. Given the joint network of researchers and clinicians, there is no doubt many of our discoveries will translate into therapeutic strategies to resolve disease,” said Sarah Knox, PhD, assistant dean for basic science.

New NIH Grants Awarded in 2023

PI Name	Project Title	Funding
Stuart Gansky, Lisa Berens, Eni Obadan-Udoh	Clinical and Translational Research Innovation in Dental Schools (ClinTrain-RIDeS)	$804,731
Andrei Goga	Understanding CDK1 Function and Cancer Vulnerabilities	$483,857
Erica Hutchins	Mechanisms of RNA turnover during the epithelial-mesenchymal transition	$403,750
Matthew Kutys	Decoding cortical Notch signaling and morphogenic instruction at cell-cell interfaces	$403,750
Stephen Floor	The molecular grammar of human RNA biology	$363,375
Terumi Kohwi-Shigematsu	Genome organizer SATB1 function in salivary gland and development and growth	$242,250
Maurizio Risolino	Specificity of RPSA-dependent translational control in mouse and human fetal spleen cells	$161,500
Laura Persson	Emergent Behavior in a Dish: Discovery of Bi-directional Spiraling as a Population Phenomenon in C. elegans Enables In-Depth Dissection of Mechanisms Underlying Group Behaviors	$122,904
Daphne Superville	Defining a novel subset of metastasis-associated monocytes	$44,629

by Joey Greaber