Three UF faculty members chosen for NIH study sections

Three University of Florida College of Medicine faculty members recently accepted invitations from the National Institutes of Health to serve on study panels for the Center for Scientific Review.

Associate Professor Brian D. Cain will serve as chairman of the center’s Physical Biochemistry Study Section through June 2001. Cain’s primary responsibility is to ensure the fairness and integrity of the peer review process. He also will help identify appropriate new members and ad hoc members, and evaluate grant applications in the areas of structural biology, protein structure-function relationships and enzymology.

Distinguished Professor Ben M. Dunn will serve on the center’s AIDS and Related Research Study Section through June 2003. He will review grant applications concerned with the design, discovery and development of therapeutics for the HIV/AIDS virus and associated complications. This includes preclinical development of gene-based therapeutics and diagnostics, traditional drugs, targeted drug design and viral resistance, and assays to measure drug levels.

Both Cain and Dunn are faculty members in the UF department of biochemistry and molecular biology.

Stephen Sugrue, chairman and associate professor of the department of anatomy and cell biology, will serve on the center’s Visual Sciences Study Section through June 2002. He will review grant applications focusing on basic, applied and clinical research on the anterior portion of the eye and its disorders, such as glaucoma, cataracts, congenital and developmental abnormalities, infectious diseases, tumors, injury and trauma.

Study section members, who are selected for their demonstrated competence and achievement in their discipline, review and make recommendations on NIH grant applications, and survey the status of research in their scientific fields.