Challenges to human, animal, and environmental health aren’t contained by geopolitical boundaries. Thanks to the Norwegian Centennial Chair program (NOCC), neither are efforts to address them — at least when it comes to the U.S. and Norway.
NOCC was established after the Norwegian government gave the University of Minnesota $750,000 to help endow a chair in bioenergy, genomics, and food safety. The University matched the grant, creating a fund to support the activities of the chair, including cultivating research partnerships between UMN and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Later the University of Oslo joined the partnership. Over the years, the three-way partnership — which has been renewed twice, with additional funding provided – has sparked numerous interdisciplinary, transnational research initiatives through a seed grant program for faculty from all three institutions as well as travel grants for students and faculty. Priority areas include biotechnology, solutions to environmental challenges, human and animal health, bio-manufacturing, food safety, and more.
Last year NOCC program heads decided to introduce a mini grant program that offers smaller grants to a larger number of collaborations and includes postdoctoral fellows among those eligible to apply. The mini grant initiative also emphasizes sparking new collaborations and funding new topics of research.
“Although it’s a relatively small amount of money, it builds substantial new networks between people and creates new types of collaborations. It’s important to get people together and get to know each other, and actively looking for potential collaborations, and then reaching out,” says CBS Distinguished McKnight University professor Claudia Schmidt-Dannert, who is the Norwegian Centennial Chair at the University of Minnesota.
The program intends to hand out several $25,000 cross-institutional mini grants. So far, it has funded nine proposals, four of which include College of Biological Sciences researchers among the applicants.
“It’s about meeting new people, being part of different ways of looking at the world and thinking about science,” says George Neil Furey, who studied the interplay of soil nutrients and plant community composition as a graduate student and then postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior before taking his current position as an associate professor at NMBU.
Furey and eight other researchers from NMBU and UMN received $25,000 through the mini grant program to explore connections between biodiversity and soil health. The grant will make it possible to add soil samples taken over decades at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Research to NMBU’s soil archives and use NMBU technology to analyze them, enhancing the ability to conduct long-term studies of how plant diversity influences soil health and vice versa.
“It’s a direct connection to what I did during my Ph.D., but with a spinoff to larger ideas,” Furey says. “I thought it would be great if we could try to apply some of the things we learned in Minnesota to the European Soil Mission, which is trying to make soil healthier by 2030.”
Distinguished McKnight University professor Eric Seabloom, one of the UMN collaborators on the project, appreciates the opportunity to maintain and grow a connection with a rising star in long-term research. “Part of this is going to be looking forward to ways we can leverage this collaboration to do some bigger things,” he says.
Plant and Microbial Biology postdoc Pablo Almela is leading another mini grant in collaboration with CBS associate professor Trinity Hamilton and UiO professor Alexander Eiler. Almela has been studying how algae that grow on snow in the mountains of the western United States affect freshwater ecosystem communities – and, ultimately, drinking water quality – as the snow melts. The mini grant will allow him to connect his work with studies Eiler has been conducting on microbial populations on Hardangerjøkulen Glacier in Norway.
“With rising temperatures, we are expecting that snow blooms are going to increase in the mountains,” Almela says. “The goal is to see if this increase in algae in snowfields is going to affect downstream waters.”
A third CBS mini grant co-led by UiO professor Håvard Kauserud and Plant and Microbial Biology professor Peter Kennedy aims to improve the use of eDNA technology to analyze microbial biodiversity in environmental settings. It builds on a longstanding relationship established with an earlier NOCC grant focused on how soil microbial communities respond to climate change.
Characterizing microbial communities via eDNA analyses is a valuable tool in both laboratory and field settings, but current technologies are limited in their precision. The mini grant will help the researchers apply a newer approach known as long-read sequencing to pinpoint exactly which organisms are present in a sample.
“This will give us the capacity to much better identify individual species of microbes in the communities we are studying,” Kennedy says. “It is an excellent way to expand our toolkit while staying united in our overall research collaborations and initiatives.”
Kennedy notes that the NOCC funding he and Kauserud received in the past has resulted in extensive collaborative research that has yielded multiple high-profile papers as well as catalyzed additional funding from other sources. “The NOCC program provides a good return on investment, building collaborations in ways that might not be easy to build by starting with large national and international grants,” he says.
The fourth CBS-affiliated mini grant is being led by Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics professor Michael Smanski and NMBU professor Margaret Øverland. The two will bring together NMBU’s expertise in sustainable aquaculture feed development and UMN’s expertise in insect engineering to assess the research, regulatory, and business environment for developing genetically modified black soldier flies as an omega-three-rich food source for fish raised in aquaculture. The hope is to use the mini grant to leverage a larger proposal that will support development of the technology and so enhance the sustainability of aquaculture, which currently relies on harvesting wild fish to supply the farmed fishes’ nutritional needs.
“Translating biotechnology out of a research laboratory and into the real world is a complicated process,” Smanski says. “We are grateful for this seed grant from NOCC that will allow us to test hypotheses we have about feasible strategies to bring nutritionally enhanced insect larva into aquaculture feed formulations.”
Schmidt-Dannert anticipates the program will fund perhaps six additional mini grant proposals. Plans are underway for a symposium in Norway in October to showcase some of the collaborations and explore ways in which the program will continue to spark transatlantic collaborations inter-institutional work going forward.
“It has been a long and very productive collaboration,” Schmidt-Dannert says. “Networks have formed; new interactions have formed. … It has been a very successful program.” — Mary Hoff