2016 NIH Funding: A Look at Top Recipients and Their Research

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UC San Francisco received more than $575.6 million in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2016. The highly competitive awards and grants are crucial to advancing the research across our schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy and the Graduate Division.



The funding supports research and education across multiple health-science arenas at UCSF. It also advances scientific health research that helps us better understand key biological functions and translate findings into treatments and cures for patients.    

Below are a few highlights of researchers who received the most NIH funding and how their NIH grants are helping them to change the future of health.

School of Medicine

Alexander Marson, MD, PhD1. Diane Havlir, $12,395,178

2. Dean Sheppard, $6,281,170

3. Alexander Marson, $6,142,102

4. John Fahy, $6,085,587

5. Steven Deeks, $5,656,950

It has long been known that genetics control the immune system, but how remains a question. Alexander Marson, MD, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology, has spent the last 10 years answering that question by exploring the genetic circuits that control specific aspects of immune cell function to understand how variations in genetics contribute to different diseases.

Marson’s goal is to use that understanding to point toward new therapies – both by finding new targets for drugs and by actually changing the genetics of immune cells to give them new functions to treat cancer, autoimmune diseases and infections affecting the immune system, such as HIV.

Marson’s studies rely on CRISPR technology, which enables researchers to cut out and replace, or “edit,” genetic sequences within living cells to understand and treat disease.

“CRISPR provides the scalpel to go in and cut out some part of the human genome and potentially even replace part of it,” Marson said. “That is just an incredible ability, to truly understand how the genome works.”

One of Marson’s current projects – with collaborators in the UCSF Diabetes Center and Institute for Human Genetics – is focused ...

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