Northern Michigan University will host its first-ever presentation by collaborative faculty and student teams who received internal research funding through NMU’s innovative PRIME program. The presentation will serve as the keynote event at the annual Celebration of Student Scholarship on Thursday, April 13. It is scheduled at 5 p.m. in 1100 Jamrich Hall.

NMU launched its Progressive Research and Innovative Mutual Exploration (PRIME) fund in 2015, challenging interdisciplinary teams of faculty to propose novel research projects with significant student involvement. The intention is to gather strong preliminary results that will increase the likelihood of advancing to external funding competitions. Key components of PRIME include greater seed money for proposed projects with high-impact potential and high likelihood of success in external competitions; and extensive opportunity for networking and cross-disciplinary collaboration that can facilitate tackling of substantive concepts.

Here are the two projects being presented on April 13:

1. What’s in your nose? A study of nasal colonizing of Staph and Strep in Marquette

Thanks to collaborative support from U.P. Health System Marquette, a Duke LifePoint Hospital, two projects were awarded in the first year. Announced in August 2015, one project included collaborative opportunities with Marquette General Duke LifePoint Hospital, which agreed to contribute matching funds in support of the project. Led by Josh Sharp of biology, Paul Mann and Catherine Bammert of Clinical Sciences and Yuba Gautum of Health and Human Performance, the project aimed to determine whether a correlation exists between use of a common vaccine and the incidence of a specific bacterial infection.

“This award helped resource combined work between Clinical Sciences, Biology, and Health and Human Performance to investigate a topic that is of interest to the University, the community and our partner, Duke LifePoint,” Mann said. “It has provided a new opportunity for our graduate and undergraduate students to conduct collaborative research on a topic of real world importance.”

2. DNA and Diversity: Zambia, Blue Wildebeest, Bioinformatics and Computer Clusters

This project was not only collaborative in disciplines, involving genetics, evolutionary biology and computer science, but also internationally collaborative, involving a partner from the Zambian Carnivore Programme in Southern Africa. The presentation will feature Jeff Horn from Computer Science discussing the work he and a number of students contributed to the massive data gathering and sequencing involved. Katherine Teeter and Alec Lindsay from Biology will share information about their work, which is ongoing. An additional public presentation will be held with more in-depth information on a date yet to be determined.

For more information, contact Erica Goff, NMU director of grants and contracts, at 227-2456.