Community Project Funding/Congressionally Directed Spending - Construction - Community Project Funding/Congressionally Directed Spending - Construction Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a family of technologies that allow us to see both the structure and function of the brain at the same time in a live human patient. The most common fMRI technique measures second-to-second changes in oxygen consumption in different parts of the brain, which goes up as the brain becomes more active. This enables us to study the brain in action during physical and mental tasks. As simple examples, fMRI lights up in the visual cortex when a patient is watching a video and in the auditory cortex when the patient is listening to music. Over the last decade, fMRI has become a critical research tool for serious and devastating neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia. This project will help to fund the establishment of an fMRI Core Research Center at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa. USF has become a major research university, with a particular focus on the neurosciences and related fields. USF is the fastest-rising university in the history of the US News Rankings, and the USF Morsani College of Medicine Is also the fastest rise in medical school in the history of the rankings, and both are in the top 50 nationally. The USF Department of Neurology is currently conducting over 170 clinical trials, making it one of the top (if not the top) departments for neurological clinical research in the nation. The USF Byrd Neuroscience Institute is a powerhouse for basic and translational neuroscience research, comprised of some of the top faculty in the country focusing on neurodegenerative diseases, most especially Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The USF College of Nursing is also a top-ranked institution with a substantial commitment to neuroscience research. The city of Tampa, already a major metro area, is on e of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. Currently, there is no fMRI research facility at USF or anywhere in the Tampa Bay metro area. Because of this, USF neuroscience research has become increasingly limited, and we have had to forego participation in numerous clinical trials. Researchers at USF across the university have had to forgo opportunities to win NIH grants which required such a facility as an essential component, an opportunity cost of many millions of potential dollars in prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding and the jobs that go with them, as well as precluding us from recruiting a number of world-class researchers and their teams from other top-ranked institutions from around the country who require such a facility for the continuation of their work. Furthermore, the citizens of Tampa Bay have been deprived of participating in numerous clinical trials requiring fMRI, most of which were focused on the most serious of neurological diseases for which there are currently no effective treatments. The USF fMRI Research Core would provide this important tool to the world-class neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, nursing, and other research programs at USF and Tampa General Hospital (TGH), increasing the share of NIH-funded research to USF and Tampa Bay, expanding our recruitment of star researchers from around the United States, enhancing our reputations and opening up new clinical trial opportunities to our patients throughout the west coast of Florida, with the net effect of raising the academic profile of both USF and TGH on rankings such as the widely used U.S. News Best University Rankings and Best Hospital Rankings, and also funding jobs within Tampa (both for the direct support of fMRI and research MRI and for those employed to do the research work of the new grants).
