Dr. Walter I Silva
The NIH-NIGMS MBRS SCORE Program at the Medical Sciences Campus (MSC) of the University of Puerto Rico is a cornerstone of extramural research funding that has made a tremendous impact on the research environment at our campus for the past 32 years. Since 1985 the Program has been essential in both the development of faculty research and the training of underrepresented minority students in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. The UPR-MSC’s Support for Competitive Research Enhancement (SCORE) Program created under the new NIH-NIGMS-MBRS S06 mechanism has been a key catalyst for the establishment of a campus-wide competitive research culture. In the Summer of 2016, the SCORE Program has been integrated as a formal Research Unit under the organizational structure of CRECED to continue its historical mission to increase the research competitiveness of investigators at the UPR-MSC in biomedical and behavioral research, and enhance the institutional research capabilities; whilst, focusing its resources on the portfolio of active and competing SCORE SC awards at the MSC. Under the direction of Dr. Walter I. Silva Ortiz, the current portfolio of SCORE SC awards at the MSC ranks number one amongst all SCORE award holding institutions (a total of forty-eight (48)) in terms of total funds ($3.575Million for 2016), number of SC awards (14) and SC1 awards (9) (Table 1). This achievement is made thanks to the high quality cadre of MSC investigators from four (4) of our six (6) schools and 2 institutes associated to the Deanship of Academic Affairs (Table 2). The SCORE Program offers separate funding opportunities for individual investigator-initiated research awards. The mechanisms used for these funding opportunities are the SC1 (PAR-14-019), SC2 (PAR-14-017) and SC3 (PAR-14-018) awards. A recent call for the internal competition process has been issued to select the next round of MSC SC applicants for 2017.
