“My participation in the grant writing workshop sponsored by tobacco funds made a huge impact on my ability to get funding of $395K from the NIH for 2022-2025.”

– Allen Thomas, PhD

Allen Thomas, PhD, began at UNK in 2014, after 13 years at Array BioPharma. He earned his PhD from the Scripps Research Institute in the lab of two-time Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Barry Sharpless. He received support from tobacco settlement dollars in the form of a program to enhance NIH grant-writing and submission from UNK biomedical researchers. In 2021, Dr. Thomas took part in a summer long grant-writing workshop with the goal of developing an R15 NIH grant submission.

UNK is a primarily undergraduate institution and, as such, the major responsibility of the faculty is to train undergraduates while carrying out high quality research. As is central to the mission of UNK, Dr. Thomas exemplifies the role of the teacher/scholar/mentor model by believing “learning matters” and “people matter.”

This ideal is so engrained in Dr. Thomas that the topic for his R15 NIH grant submission was based on an idea from one of his undergraduate research students, Mackenzie Hagemeister of Arlington, Nebraska. The project was to develop inhibitors of the key enzyme involved in making melatonin, serotonin N-acetyl-transferase (SNAT). By better understanding SNAT’s function, Dr. Thomas’s group is trying to develop a drug to treat seasonal affective disorder and other disorders in which melatonin levels are abnormally high. In 2022, Dr. Thomas received $395,000 to study Mackenzie’s idea. This was only the second R15 NIH grant awarded to UNK, which paved the way for two other chemistry faculty, who also received tobacco settlement dollars, to earn R15 NIH funding.

“My participation in the grant writing workshop sponsored by tobacco funds made a huge impact on
my ability to get funding of $395K from the NIH for 2022-2025. It was during this workshop that I was able to refine my grantsmanship and then write a proposal that was funded after the first submission, which is
a rare achievement. This NIH grant has enabled eight undergraduates to perform research with me and be able to publish their findings in impactful journals as well as present at regional and national chemistry conferences. One of my current students is applying to PhD programs in chemical biology because of working on this project. Another student went to UNMC after graduating from UNK and was in the top 10 of her medical school class. No doubt, her experiences in research contributed to her success as a medical student.”

At UNK, Dr. Thomas is one of UNK’s research leaders. He is a Donald E. Fox Endowed Chair and Professor of Organic Chemistry with a history of research excellence in drug design to treat brain cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and brain/mental health disorders. He embodies the role of teacher/scholar/mentor by training the future health science and biomedical workforce.