Professor receives NIH grant

Tyrrell Conway, professor of microbiology and director of the University of Oklahoma Microarray Core Facility, has been awarded a five-year grant totaling $2.1 million by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Conway, who is also director of the Oklahoma Bioinformatics Network and co-director of the OU Advanced Center for Genome Technology, will use the funding to conduct research on “Growth and Colonization of the Intestine by E. coli.”

According to the NIH project information, the research could lead to a higher level of understanding of human intestinal health and the opportunity to build a nutritional framework to defend against intestinal infections.

Conway earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in microbiology and served as a post-doctoral research associate at Oklahoma State University. He was a faculty research assistant at the University of Florida before spending six years at the University of Nebraska, where he served as an associate professor of microbiology and in 1992-93 as the acting associate director of the university’s Center for Biotechnology. He also spent five years as an associate professor of microbiology at Ohio State University before joining OU’s College of Arts and Sciences Department of Botany and Microbiology in 1999.