Research
The University of Missouri is on the forefront of life sciences research. Our research advances basic understanding of life and leads to improved disease prevention, new medical treatments and agricultural advances.
A pervasive atmosphere of interaction and cooperation on campus facilitates collaboration and cooperation among research groups with complementary expertise. Such collaboration is broadly based because we are one of only six public universities with agriculture, arts and sciences, medicine, veterinary medicine and law on one campus.
The Department of Biochemistry is a central participant in such interdisciplinary research. With our very name, we span biology and chemistry. In the same spirit, we span many other boundaries. For instance, we are part of both the School of Medicine and the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and we share faculty members with four other departments (Biomedical Sciences, Education, Nutritional Sciences and Physics), in four other Colleges.
Our graduate program includes eight additional faculty members from seven other departments or divisions (Animal Sciences, Chemistry, Molecular Microbiology, Ophthalmology, Physics, Plant Genetic Research Unit, USDA and Plant Sciences). Eight Biochemistry faculty members, three additional members of our graduate faculty, and four research faculty are part of interdisciplinary research clusters housed in the multidisciplinary Life Sciences Center and many are members of campus-wide interdisciplinary groups such as those focused on plants, neurosciences, genetics and nutrition.
One measure of our research success is sustained growth, over decades, in competitive, external funding. Last fiscal year funding of our core faculty supported $8.5 million of research. In the two most recent two years of statistics from the Association of American Medical Colleges, MU Biochemistry ranked in the top 10 for research expenditures among biochemistry departments at the nation's public medical schools. Several biochemistry research groups contribute to making MU No. 7 in the nation in plant sciences funding and No. 14 in overall funding from the National Science Foundation.
As illustrated in the list to the left, the over 35 research groups associated with the department cover essentially all facets of contemporary biochemical research. Opportunities to be part of these groups and to use campus-wide, state-of-the-art facilities are available to students at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels. A recent addition to our research facilities was a cutting-edge, $2.1 million nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, installed as the second of its generation in the U.S. and the only one in Missouri.
