Alaska Biomedical Researchers Receive Funding to Track COVID-19 Variants
© Noipornpan | Dreamstime.com
A team of University of Alaska biomedical researchers will join a federally funded effort to improve tracking of COVID-19 variants throughout the state.
The National Institutes of Health is providing a $770,000 grant to support efforts to sequence and analyze genomes of variants circulating in Alaska. The program will expand efforts in the state to include cases detected in Indigenous health networks and provide a way to share information about “variants of concern” throughout the health system.
NIH funds the Institutional Development Award program (IDeA), and a team of researchers with the Alaska IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, or INBRE, will receive the grant. The INBRE program is part of a federal effort to boost research capacity in certain targeted states, including Alaska.
“This award shows that the National Institutes of Health recognizes the importance of extending research on the changing nature of the COVID-19 virus to rural states like Alaska and our important Alaska Native communities,” said Brian Barnes, the INBRE program director and principal investigator of the effort.
Current Issue
May 2026
Participants include University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers Jack Chen and Devin Drown, and University of Alaska Anchorage researchers Jason Burkhead, Cindy Knall and Eric Bortz.
Other collaborators on the project include the Southcentral Foundation and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
Chen, an associate professor of virology, also is the deputy director of the Alaska State Virology Laboratory on the Fairbanks campus. That joint appointment boosts opportunities for collaboration between UAF and the state’s public health labs amid a pandemic, he said.
Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame 2026
New approaches to roads and pipelines, electric grids, and building technologies earned Doug Goering, Clay Koplin, and Tom Marsik their spots in the Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame.
Cosmic Perspective: Building the UAF Planetarium
The largest planetarium in Alaska just opened on the UAF campus. Trace the work that went into designing and building a state-of-the-art space theater.
Eight Startups Selected for Launch Alaska Portfolio
Remote Hands and Applied Atomics are the Alaska-grown companies among eight energy and tech startups taken under Launch Alaska’s wing.
