Since its formative years, UAB has conducted groundbreaking research and scholarship across the traditional boundaries among disciplines, with different schools and departments sharing resources, labs, and of course, sharing knowledge. The result is an intensely collaborative, interdisciplinary culture that thrives to this day.

Over four decades, that collaborative culture has produced many “firsts" in science and medicine, and that pioneering spirit continues in every classroom, lab, library, and some eighty campuswide interdisciplinary research centers, as students work alongside faculty toward the next major breakthrough.

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    • 31st nationally in federal research funding
    • 20th in funding from the National Institutes of Health (10th among public universities)
    • Classified as an institution of “very high research activity” by the Carnegie Foundation.
    • External research funding exceeding $460 million
    • Record $489 million in external research funding in 2009 and record NIH funding of $270 million.

 



Pushing the Envelope in Science and Medicine...


UAB faculty and students are daily pushing the envelope in science and medicine. They are engineering revolutionary new materials and composites for use in everything from dental implants to body armor to spacecraft. They are developing new technologies for virtual reality, robotic surgery and cleaner, greener vehicles. And they are shedding new light on a host of human diseases and conditions—from Alzheimer's  to diabetes to AIDS to sickle cell anemia—and giving hope to patients throughout the state, nation and indeed the world.
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  • UAB physican-researchers are at the top of their fields, serving as editors-in-chief of 25 peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals and in high-level national posts: UAB faculty are currently serving as immediate past president of the American Cancer Society, president-elect of the American Heart Association, and an alumna (Dr. Regina Benjamin) is Surgeon General of the U.S.
  • In the 2011 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities, UAB is ranked 34th in clinical medicine, 52nd in life sciences and 127th in social sciences.
  • UAB is among only four schools in the nation with an NIH Neurosciences Interdisciplinary Center Grant ($8.6 million) that links investigators from institutions across the state and region to speed discovery and development of new drugs and therapies for neurological diseases.
  • NIH has designated UAB as one of only six Diabetes Research and Training Centers in the country, putting the university at the forefront in development of new methods to treat, prevent and ultimately cure diabetes.
  • In the new Materials Processing and Application Development (MPAD) facility, the largest academic research facility of its kind in the nation, UAB engineers are pioneering leading-edge metals and composites for a range of applications--from missile systems to lighter, more fuel-efficient city buses.
  • NCI has awarded the Comprehensive Cancer Center four highly competitive Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grants for research on cervical, brain, breast and pancreatic cancers. Only three of the nation’s 41 NCI-designated centers have more of these grants than UAB.
  • UAB excels at taking discoveries from the lab to the bedside in the form of revolutionary treatments and therapies. The Center for Clinical and Translational Science, created with a $26.9 million NIH grant, accelerates the bench-to-bedside process through partnership among UAB researchers, our community, and other premier health centers around the nation.
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UAB research knows no bounds. Literally. Faculty and students conduct research in Antarctica, investigating chemical defenses of marine life and the role these could play in prevention of diseases such as heart disease, cystic fibrosis, cancer and AIDS. They are using satellite imaging to discover ancient ruins in Egypt, recently featured in a BBC documentary, and to track global public health threats at the UAB Laboratory for Global Health Observation.

They are doing vital, leading-edge research in cybercrime perpetrated from computers around the globe, partnering with such agencies as the FBI, IRS, NASA, Homeland Security, CIA and Interpol.

They are also pushing the "final frontier." UAB has long partnered with NASA in space exploration, doing crystallography experiments aboard the space shuttle Columbia and operating spectrometers of Mars Rovers.

Carrying on that tradition are the aerospace engineers of the Center for Biophysical Sciences and Engineering which since 2008 has designed the cryogenic freezers that are aboard space shuttles and the International Space Station.

...And in the Liberal Arts.


As a true "renaissance" university, UAB excels and conducts research and scholarship in a range of disciplines--from the sciences and medicine to business and the liberal arts.


Emblematic of this character is the university's College of Arts and Sciences formed in spring 2010. UAB built upon the excellence of existing programs to create this new college that is now delivering 21st-century curricula to more than 6,900 students in the arts and humanities, natural sciences and math, social and behavorial sciences and education.
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  • Music and Art faculty, such as artist Gary Chapman and pianist and Van Cliburn Medal winner Yakov Kasman, exhibit and perform around the nation and the world, from New York to Florence to Moscow to Tokyo.
  • The Center for Urban Education is pioneering new and effective strategies for teachers in inner city schools and has trained some eighty teachers for high needs schools inmock_trial Jefferson County.
  • The School of Business's national award winning Green and Gold Fund, featured on CNBC, is a student investment fund with over $500,000 in assets.
  • UAB in recent years has won national championships in both Mock Trial, the Ethics Bowl and the Bioethics Bowl.
  • The Department of Communication Studies is ranked in the top five nationally in scholarship, and has on faculty two of the top five communications scholars in the nation.
  • with 24 Steinway pianos, The Department of Music is designated as an All-Steinway School, the first in Alabama and one of only 125 in the world.
  • UAB’s Mervyn H. Sterne Library houses the 3rd largest Marcel Proust collection on the planet.



To learn about the very latest UAB research and scholarship, click here or visit UAB News.