NIH Awards University of Idaho $11M For Studies on Women's Health

University of Idaho has been awarded with over $11 million by National Institutes of Health (NIH) for building a biomedical research center that has a key focus towards furthering studies on women’s health and nutrition.

Professor of nutrition and director of the Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS), Shelley McGuire has successfully acquired the application confirmation for the NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant. She will be serving as the project director and principal investigator there. Shelley is a maternal-infant nutritionist while having expertise in breastfeeding and lactation. In addition, she has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine as well.

She expressed, “It’s going to bolster our ability to do high-level, federally funded research on a topic that should be important to every single human. We are hoping to have impacts in the state, region and nation. The whole topic of health and nutrition in women is important from early life, through breastfeeding, through pregnancy and all the way until women get older when we have a higher risk of poor health outcomes like osteoporosis and specific types of cancer.” NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence has named three initial research project leaders that includes (a) Yimin Chen, (b) Ginny Lane, (c) Ann Brown.