This past June, the Louisiana Recovery Authority awarded grants to three Loyola professors to help encourage the economic and scholastic development of southern Louisiana.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development gave $10.4 billion in community-development block grants to the LRA after the 2005 hurricane season. Through the state Regents Panel, 11 teams of local scientists and professors shared $27.5 million of that money. The teams were chosen on the basis of their presented proposals.
Successful proposals had to have the most potential for creating jobs, educating and training people for those jobs, and drawing in and keeping faculty and able students. The panel also looked for proposals that would help make biotechnology an important part of the local economy and make the best use of staff by creating alliances with outside establishments.
Representing the biology department, associate biology professor Patricia Dorn was awarded $498,000. That money will go to the research of tropical diseases. Her proposal was to study Chagas disease in southeastern Louisiana. The leading cause of heart disease in Latin American countries, Chagas disease saw its first case in Louisiana in summer 2006. The disease has affected wildlife such as armadillos, possums and dogs, and, Dorn said, “We know that there are 12 million immigrants now from Latin America who are coming … from highly endemic areas, many who have the parasite and don’t even know it.”
This disease, which could be lethal if not treated, is very rare. There have only been about six cases in the United States. So, Dorn said, cause for alarm is not needed, but “we want physicians to become more aware of it … Chagas disease is no longer a tropical disease.”
While she is still doing research with the help of a group of students, she also plans to teach her recent discoveries to future students.
In the music department, John Snyder, the Conrad N. Hilton Eminent Scholar Chairman in music industry studies, was awarded $992,278 – the largest amount awarded at Loyola. His grant will go toward a music, entertainment and education alliance between Loyola, the University of New Orleans, Dillard University and Delgado Community College to foster music industry education.
These schools will join together to create what Snyder calls a “community coalescence around the idea of music industry and entertainment industry.” The alliance will also train and educate students and aid work force development, creating content that would be useful to the student musicians and music entrepreneurs.
The alliance plans to offer seminars, concerts, master classes and workshops on local access channels WWL-TV, WDSU and WVUE, and on the Internet. Snyder’s efforts will, he said, “help ease the movement of students through these various levels of educational pursuits and find ways to stimulate the cultural economy.
“This city has the most people per capita who claim to be musicians than any other city in the country, and it has no infrastructure … it’s a little bit surprising and unfortunate,” he said.
The consortium seeks to provide tools to create successful and knowledgeable musicians and to create the infrastructure that the city lacks.
Maureen Shuh, associate biology professor, was the third Loyola professor to be awarded money from this grant – $500,000. According to a Loyola press release, the money will “support travel and research activities of students interested in cancer biology.”
Shuh declined to comment to The Maroon.
Gabi Rivera can be reached at [email protected].
