January 2025 Awards and Accolades

Nathan Upham, assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences was awarded an NIH/NIGMS R35-MIRA award.

The NIH/NIGMS R35-MIRA Award refers to the Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) program funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The MIRA program provides long-term support for investigators to enhance the efficiency and stability of their research programs. It aims to fund innovative and impactful projects that align with NIGMS's mission to support fundamental biomedical research.

The award, titled "Mammal-virus evolution from global to local scales" is $250k/year for 5 years for his lab to pursue a range of different projects under the theme of mammal-virus interactions. Upham and his lab are planning fieldwork on desert rodents across Arizona as part of this work, especially in the Phoenix Metro area and in the Madrean sky-island mountains of Southeastern Arizona.

The research program aims to identify predictive rules for cross-species viral transmission, or spillover, from wild mammals to humans, addressing global health challenges such as Ebola, monkeypox and SARS-related coronaviruses. The work focuses on improving the quality and precision of data and models to better understand spillover dynamics. Efforts include developing tools to curate and update mammal and virus genetic data to address outdated taxonomies, refining spillover risk models by incorporating species-level ecological and physiological variations and conducting field-based genomic surveys of rodents in Arizona to explore how gene flow predicts viral sharing. By combining global data curation with localized field studies, the research seeks to enhance understanding of spillover mechanisms and provide tools to mitigate zoonotic risks.

Masmudur Rahman, assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences and Biodesign Center for Personalized Diagnostics was awarded an R21 award from the NIH.

An R21 award, also known as an exploratory/developmental grant, from the NIH supports exploratory research, encouraging the development of new research activities in categorical program areas. 

Rahman’s project, titled “Unravelling the mechanisms of virus host species jump,” uncovers how viruses jump from one species to another is crucial to prevent and respond to disease outbreaks like COVID-19 and monkeypox. This research focuses on the Myxoma virus (MYXV), which originally infected a specific rabbit species without causing harm but became deadly when it spread to European rabbits in the 19th century. In the 1950s, MYXV was intentionally introduced in Australia and Europe to control wild rabbit populations, providing a well-documented example of how viruses and their hosts evolve together.

In 2018, a new version of MYXV, called MYXV-Tol, was discovered in Iberian hares in Spain, causing a deadly disease in hares and spreading to wild rabbits. This new strain has unique genetic changes, including an inserted set of genes and disrupted ones, which may explain why it is so lethal in hares. Researchers have identified a specific gene, M159-Tol, that is essential for the virus to infect hare cells but found that it plays little role in the disease's progression in rabbits. This suggests the virus has adapted to infect hares but behaves differently in rabbits.

This study aims to explore how MYXV-Tol causes severe disease in rabbits and pinpoint the genetic changes responsible. Understanding these mechanisms will help scientists predict and control how viruses evolve to infect new species and cause outbreaks in the future.