Record-Setting Grants Set Stage for Breakthrough Research at UConn, Hartford Seminary

Two Connecticut higher education institutions have earned record-breaking grants in recent weeks to undertake groundbreaking research.  The University of Connecticut and the Hartford Seminary – occupying very different locations on the education spectrum – have each gained notice for their expertise, to good result.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the University of Connecticut a $40 million research grant award, the largest in the University’s history, to UConn School of Medicine for further advancing molecular research nationally for chemistry, materials science, and bioscience.

Hartford Seminary has been awarded a five-year, $5.3 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to fund research into how congregations are changing, innovating, and establishing new ministry practices as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research (HIRR) will lead the project. The grant is the largest ever received by the HIIR in its four decade history. 

“Not only is the grant award substantial, but the research it will support is incredibly important, building upon the outstanding 40-year history of the HIRR. I could not be more proud,” said Hartford Seminary President Joel N. Lohr.

Principal Investigator of the project and Director of HIRR, Scott Thumma, explained that the study, titled Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations: Innovation Amidst and Beyond COVID-19, will explore how Christian faith communities across the nation are adapting to a changed reality due to the challenging dynamics of the pandemic.

Thumma said because of Lilly Endowment’s generous support, HIRR will be able to gather data and engage religious leaders during the next five years to develop beneficial lessons and pathways for congregations in a post-Covid era.

UConn’s NSF grant will establish a new future distributed Network for Advanced NMR (NAN), led and based at UConn’s medical school in collaboration with the University of Georgia and the University of Wisconsin, according to UConn Today.   NMR is nuclear magnetic resonance, a powerful method for analyzing molecules.

NAN has three main goals: to provide institutional researchers across the country with open access to the most powerful instruments; simplify the discovery and use of NMR resources; and foster good data stewardship. It is designed to allow researchers across the U.S. to expand their own biomedical research study findings while also collectively contributing any new scientific insights to the evolving NAN knowledge bases.

Researchers will be able to visit or deliver their samples for analysis using state-of-the-art 1.1 GHz instruments located in Madison, Wisconsin and Athens, Georgia. Both instruments will be linked to a central hub based at UConn Health in Farmington that will assist discovery and scheduling, host knowledge bases with information on optimal experiment design, and securely archive the collected data.

“This new infrastructure, along with the network of scientists to support it, will advance research in biological sciences across the country through innovative experimentation and new biological insights,” says NSF Assistant Director for Biological Sciences Joanne Tornow.

The Network, led by UConn’s Jeffrey C. Hoch, Ph.D. of UConn School of Medicine, is a collaboration with co-principal investigators Art Edison from the University of Georgia, and Katherine Henzler-Wildman and Chad Rienstra from the University of Wisconsin.

“Thanks to NSF’s funding, our new Network will empower researchers to have open access to the latest advanced NMR technology with the necessary computational power to fuel future discoveries,” said Hoch, professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biophysics at UConn School of Medicine. “Any researcher nationwide with a laptop will be able to make use of these powerful NMR instruments, methods, and online data bank.”

“Our biggest hope is that NAN and advanced NMR technology’s expanded use will accelerate the identification of future disease biomarkers and ultimately improve the health and outcomes of patients everywhere, through future advances in diagnostics, drug discovery, treatments and especially much-needed cures,” explained Hoch, who directs UConn’s Gregory P. Mullen NMR Structural Biology Facility, and is the director of NMRbox, an online NMR software resource platform.

 “The University of Connecticut is extremely honored to receive recognition of our leading NMR research expertise from the National Science Foundation. We are so proud of Dr. Hoch’s incredible accomplishments. This new Network is a major solution and step toward incredible bioscience advancements for his research team, UConn and beyond,” says Dr. Andrew Agwunobi, Interim President of the University of Connecticut and CEO of UConn Health.

The grant received by the Hartford Seminary will enable the HIRR team to collaborate with a network of nearly two dozen scholars and organizations working throughout the nation who are researching the health and vitality of congregations that are representative of the diversity of Christianity in America. Additional funding will be sought to include other faith communities in the research. In 2020, a nearly $300,000 Lilly Endowment planning grant helped HIRR design the research project.

“This moment is such a critical time for congregations. If churches can leverage the creative adaptations in response to the pandemic, the struggles of the last 18 months might lead to the revitalization of spiritual and worship practices,” Thumma said. “Our team is thrilled to be given this opportunity to take an active role in tracking that unfolding reality across the United States. We deeply appreciate Lilly Endowment’s faith in our project and our team’s ability to undertake this vital exploration.”

Clare R. Feldman, chair of Hartford Seminary’s Board of Trustees, said the benefits of this grant are numerous: “Most noteworthy is that it will enable Hartford Seminary to study the impact of Covid-19 on congregational life and to make those findings available to religious leaders as they go forward,” she said, adding that it will further the Seminary’s commitment to religion research.

For more information on the Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations project, visit www.covidreligionresearch.org.  More information on the UConn grant can be seen here.