UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences researchers bring more than $11 million into North Dakota in four months for health projects

GRAND FORKS, N.D.—Over the past four months alone, researchers across programs at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (SMHS) have brought more than $3.3 million in new research grants to North Dakota. This figure doesn’t even count the renewal of grants previously awarded to the school, which brings the School’s overall award total to more than $11 million since the start of the fiscal year.

Since July 1, 2026, SMHS researchers have been awarded $11,266,833 by a variety of federal and state agencies, predominantly the National Institutes of Health, and a handful of private entities such as AARP and the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.

Award highlights include more than $3.6 million from the Health Resources and Services Administration to UND’s Center for Rural Health (CRH) to continue the operation of the Rural Health Information Hub, a national clearinghouse on rural health issues. This funding for year two of a five-year award was awarded to Kristine Sande, associate director of CRH.

Sande’s grant notwithstanding, CRH officials have brought an additional $2.8 million to North Dakota since July 1 for a variety of healthcare programs, including those focused on communicating healthcare research to rural populations and healthy aging in American Indian communities.

Jacob Warren, director of the Center for Rural Health, shared the importance of external funding to CRH. “The Center for Rural Health is committed to working with rural communities across North Dakota and the country to create knowledge, provide expertise, and share resources for rural health needs and priorities,” Warren said. “This funding makes our work possible.”

CRH notwithstanding, associate professors David Bradley and Catherine Brissette, who lead UND’s NIH-funded Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (CoBRE) program for Host-Pathogen Interactions, were awarded $1,057,500 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to continue their team’s study into a variety of infectious diseases.

Likewise, Archana Dhasarathy, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, received nearly $800,000 from NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division while Amanda Haage, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, was awarded more than $700,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project designed to better train and map the careers of biomedical science faculty in higher education.

Finally, a team of cancer researchers at UND led by associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the SMHS Department of Population Health, S. Cristina Oancea, received more than $400,000 in continuing funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for the North Dakota Statewide Cancer Registry. North Dakota's only cancer registry was also named a "Registry of Distinction" by CDC recently. 

“As this list of awards over just the past few months suggests, our research teams have been firing on all cylinders lately,” said Colin Combs, Ph.D., senior associate dean in the SMHS Office of Research Affairs & Compliance. “Our efforts to boost research productivity and seek out more potential treatments—faster—for the health conditions that affect North Dakotans is paying off.”

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Brian James Schill
Senior Communication Specialist
Office of Communications & Engagement 
UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences 
701.777.6048 direct | 701.777.4305 office
brian.schill@UND.edu  |  www.UND.edu