IUPUI

Funded Signature Centers for 2006-2007

Center for Earth and Environmental Science

This center will become a leader in scholarship and teaching about water quality and health. It is poised to make rapid and substantial impacts that will propel water resources research and training at IUPUI onto a state and national stage. The center will also create an integrated program which applies innovative scientific discovery to current and emerging threats to water resources in Central Indiana, the Midwest, and beyond.
» http://www.cees.iupui.edu/

Center for Regenerative Biology and Medicine

This center has three missions: multidisciplinary research aimed at understanding how to regenerate tissues, organs and appendages damaged by injury or disease; provide advanced academic training in regenerative biology and medicine leading to the MS and PhD degrees; and technology transfer. The unique feature of this center is that it is the only such multidisciplinary center in the world to include amphibians as research models to understand regenerative mechanisms.
» http://www.regen.iupui.edu/

Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

This center is a research and public outreach institute devoted to promoting a better understanding of the relation between religion and other aspects of American culture. Established in 1989 with start-up funds from Lilly Endowment, the center is based in the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUIArts at IUPUI. Now with over forty Research Fellows, the center is considered the premier research institute in the nation working in American religious studies.
» http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/

Cellular Therapy, Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Center

This center will draw on the unique expertise in hematopoiesis, immunology, gene therapy, graft engineering, and clinical hematopoietic stem cell transplantation available at IUPUI to develop a nationally and internationally visible Program focused on the development of novel cellular therapies for cancer. The scholars in the center envision an interdisciplinary approach that brings together the collaboration of basic and clinical scientists at IUPUI, focused on translating discoveries from bench-to-clinic through phase I and early phase II clinical trials.

Center for Family Violence Prevention, Education and Research

The academic focus of this center will be the tripartite academic model of research, education, and service. It will provide seed funding for researchers with novel approaches on how to assess, study, prevent, and manage family abuse, targeting abusers and victims alike. The faculty participants in the center will hold local and national research meetings on these issues and provide the infrastructure for growing the research base in this area. The center will be grounded in a major health and socials problem but not in any single professional discipline, creating the opportunity to construct a remarkably multidisciplinary center that will attract faculty and students from many schools on campus.
» http://medicine.iu.edu/body.cfm?id=4722

Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence

This is a major new academic center at IUPUI. It was founded on May 10, 2004 with a gift of $5.25 million. It is headquartered and managed by the Kelley School of Business at IUPUI. The center has inaugurated a range of programs including: Hoosier Fellows Program, Tobias Graduate Fellows, Tobias Lecture, Semler Lecture, Hazelett Forum, Tobias Chair, Tobias Faculty Fellows, and the Oral History Project.
» http://www.tobiascenter.iu.edu/

Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy

The primary objective of this center will be to promote research excellence in the area of renewable energy through the development of hydrogen fuel cell technology and the development of renewable hydrogen production technologies. To reach this goal the center will promote collaboration among faculty members from engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, and environmental affairs. The center will be built upon the basis of the current Advanced Energy Lab but will expand the activities to multidiscipline and multi-school. In addition to excellence in research, the center will also serve as a focal point for student and public education and civic engagement in the renewable energy area.
» http://www.lugarenergycenter.iupui.edu/

Service Learning Research Collaborative

The mission of this center will be to increase the capacity of IUPUI faculty to engage in research on service learning practice, initially on three themes: international service learning; assessing outcomes; and retention of first-year and minority students. The center will also convene internal and external service learning scholars to develop new conceptual frameworks and methodological tools to improve the quality of service learning research.
» http://csl.iupui.edu/slrc.html

PREGMED: Pharmacogenetics and Therapeutics Research

This unique center's central goal will be to improve the therapy of health problems related to both women and their unborn children using a personalized medicine approach that builds on the strength of this medical center in the area of neonatology coupled with the cutting edge science of pharmacogenomics. The center's activities will focus on developing new paradigms for the treatment of the following important conditions: nausea and vomiting of pregnancy; depression; preterm labor; preeclampsia and hypertensive disorders.

Center for Advanced Studies in Hearing, Perception and Language

This center will follow an interdisciplinary approach to study the effects of hearing loss on perception abilities, communication skills, and neural auditory processing across the lifespan. This center is comprised of four distinct research laboratories (i.e., the Infant Language Laboratory, the DeVault Otologic Research Laboratory, the Phonological Systems Laboratory and the Electrophysiology Laboratory) thereby allowing for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of hearing, perception and language. These laboratories integrate knowledge and methodologies from different disciplines to study communication in hearing-impaired individuals across a lifespan of development from infancy to adulthood and aging.

Institute for Research on Social Issues

This center will enable the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI to put in place an infrastructure to fully support social research. By intentionally fostering the synergy of interdisciplinary, collaborative inquiry and providing for the scholarly sharing and public dissemination of research results, the center will raise the profile of social research at IUPUI, enhance the potential for financial support, and serve as a platform from which to generate and apply knowledge addressing social issues locally, nationally, and internationally.
» http://irsi.iupui.edu

Binational/Cross-Cultural Health Enhancement Center

This center will have an academic focus on research on binational health issues of recent immigrants to the state of Indiana and of the rural communities in Mexico from where those immigrants come. Specifically, the center will focus its efforts on oral health and nutrition including behaviors and social determinants of health in those two areas and related conditions such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Research initiatives will be in the following areas: dental, medical, nursing, socio-behavioral sciences and public health. The overall goal of the center is to understand the web of interactions across biological, cultural, behavioral and demographic domains and to advance knowledge in these areas with real-life, practical applications to the future of the State of Indiana.

Tobacco Cessation and Biobehavioral Center

This center will bring researchers together from different disciplines to better understand the mechanisms and biology of the effects of tobacco use, as well its control, prevention, and cessation. The research of the center will encompass multiple disciplines involving basic tobacco-related biological research, behavioral research, civic engagement, and teaching and learning. The center will also focus on ways to eliminate or reduce minority health disparities related to tobacco use in order to prevent and reduce the use of tobacco by minorities, low income individuals, the chemically addicted, pregnant women, children, youth, and other at risk populations with tobacco-related health issues.

IUPUI Center for Mathematical Biosciences

This will serve as an umbrella center for spearheading research and programmatic activities in the general bio-mathematics area. This center will provide an integrated structure for effective collaborative work as the interface between the mathematical sciences and the life and health sciences communities on the IUPUI campus, which will result in higher national and international visibility and increased research excellence in this area of the university. This center will cover a number of health and life-sciences related mathematics research, with strong emphasis on mathematical modeling, computations and data analysis.
» http://www.math.iupui.edu/cmb/

Center for Computational Diagnostics

This center's innovative research includes the integration of high throughput technology into clinical trials to improve early detection, treatment, and monitoring of diseases in children and adults. Building on the Regenstrief Institute and leveraging the diverse strengths of IUPUI, the IU School of Medicine, and Purdue, the center will bring "data and minds together," that is, integrate data and create project-specific multi-disciplinary teams to work with these data, achieving progress in both basic and clinical research that is increasingly difficult to achieve by individual investigator-driven research teams.
» http://www.iupui.edu/~compdiag/

Consortium for Health Policy, Law, Bioethics

This consortium creates an innovation and dynamic environment to facilitate research, education, and public policy service on issues in health care, health and science policy, and the life sciences. The consortium's mission is to provide an innovative, interdisciplinary organizational environment that enhances existing IUPUI/IU capacity in health policy, law and bioethics. The consortium strives to inform social and public policy in health, facilitate cross-cutting interdisciplinary research, and support current and developing degree and certificate programs.
» http://hplb.iupui.edu/

Center for Excellence in Bio-Computing

This center will seamlessly integrate multiple disciplines (e.g., Computer Science, Biology, Medicine, and Informatics) and leverage existing research and educational initiatives on the campus to provide a strong foundation for investigations of various aspects of Bio-Computing. The center's objective is to bring these groups together under a common collaborative umbrella to help them augment each other's expertise to create new energy and breakthroughs, and to establish an infrastructure that enables the expansion of Bio-Computing research to benefit the entire IU life science community.
» http://www.cs.iupui.edu/SCBC/