The University of Montana has ranked among the top 10 universities on Successful Student’s list for “Best Universities Solving the Coronavirus Pandemic”.

UM Vice President for Research and Creative Scholarship, Scott Whittenburg has details.

“Back to Back top 10 rankings and two different areas related to research,” said Whittenberg. “This particular one is coming from a student based website called Student Success, and they're preparing a list of the Top 10 universities actually in the world that are doing research related to the COVID pandemic. This one they're listed labeled as the best university solving Coronavirus endemic.”

Whittenberg described just one of the recent honors for UM.

“This particular project is out of our Center for Translational Medicine,” he said. “And they've been selected by the National Institutes of Health and a branch called in NAI D and its further work on adjuvant vaccine development, as humans are compounds that are added to vaccines to make them more effective. And so the big deal here is that then allows the vaccines you can use smaller doses which means the amount they make can be given to more people.”

In addition, Whittenberg said UM received kudos for its publications.

“This recognition of the publications of our research faculty at the University out of the University of Leiden, and it analyzes the publications in two different ways,” he said. “That is, from faculty at other university citing our publications, and then how much we collaborate with other faculty researchers around the world and the research and publications that we do.”

Whittenberg said the honors will bring positive attention to the University of Montana.

“I think it's going to help both in terms of recruiting because we're already going to put this up onto our web page,” he said. “So it's going to help in recruiting both new students coming to the campus, both undergraduates and graduate students. It helps when we try to attract research faculty to our campus. It's going to help us in getting future funding for our researchers, so I think it's going to help drive research and help drive undergraduate enrollment.”

Follow the UM Center for Translational Medicine’s work online here.

 

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