It was a very good year.

18 INNOVATION www.unlv.edu 19 INNOVATION As with any great team–be it in sports or in the laboratory–success is rarely a product of happenstance. So it was no accident when, in the span of just three months last year, several research teams in UNLV’s School of Life Sciences (SOLS) were awarded sizable grants from some of the nation’s most respected funding agencies. Seven teams were notified last summer that they would receive more than $3 million in grant funding. All told, in 2007 faculty in the school received nine grants totaling more than $7 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other agencies, resulting in the single most productive funding year in the school’s history. “We couldn’t be more proud of the faculty,” says Carl Reiber, associate dean of the College of Sciences and former director of the SOLS. “The school’s recent success makes evident the importance of building a team of researchers who has not only a strong and complementary range of expertise but also a chemistry that allows them to build on each other’s strengths.” He adds that the school has worked arduously in the last several years to develop the research and personnel infrastructure required to produce this achievement. The initial groundwork for the accomplishment, Reiber says, was laid six years ago when he and other colleagues from the then-biological sciences department received a grant from the NSF Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The grant was awarded to help UNLV build the technical infrastructure required to support the advancement of life sciences research. Those funds, along with a grant from the Nevada IDeA Networks for Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) program, helped build a genomics lab, imaging facilities, and bioinformatics program. All of these additions proved integral to the school’s ability to attract and retain a corps of active faculty researchers, who set about acquiring competitive grant funding with vigor. Still, given the enormous competition for prestigious federal grants, their success was quite an achievement, according to Dennis Bazylinski, the current director of the SOLS. “The sheer number of proposals submitted to these agenLife Sciences