North Dakota Spirit Faculty Achievement Award recipients (from left):?Othman Ghribi, PhD, Seema Sonji, PhD, Brij Singh, PhD, and Colin Combs, PhD

Several medical school faculty members, all biomedical research scientists, have received the first North Dakota Spirit Faculty Achievement Award. The award, funded by the UND Foundation, was established to recognize significant contributions by faculty in teaching, research and service.

Recipients, who were recognized during the annual UND Founders Day banquet in February, are

Colin Combs, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology, physiology and therapeutics, received a four-year, $700,000, R01 grant from National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute on Aging, to study a specific mechanism in the brain that could play a role in the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). R01 grants are very difficult to obtain and are awarded to relatively few researchers.

Othman Ghribi, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology, physiology and therapeutics, studies the role that diet and the environment play in the development of AD.  He received a five-year, $1.5 million, R01 grant from the NIH to study the links between high cholesterol levels and AD. This is the largest individual grant awarded to a UND researcher for the study of AD.

Brij Singh, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, conducts research on calcium mechanisms in the body that can, if not working properly, lead to diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease and Sjögren’s syndrome, a salivary gland dysfunction. His work is focused on how and why calcium, one of the most important biochemical regulators in the body, works at the cellular level.

Seema Somji, PhD, assistant professor of pathology, investigates heavy metal environmental carcinogens in the development of bladder cancer and the discovery of new diagnostic or prognostic markers of bladder cancer. Recently keratin 6a was discovered as a potential marker in heavy-metal-induced bladder tumors; Somji is focused on the mechanisms of induced oncogenic expression as well as the assessment and use of this potential marker in bladder cancer diagnostics.