BB is grateful for the Hamill Foundation's long term support. The Hamill Innovation Awards, now in their twelfth year, continue to fund the initiation of new collaborative research by faculty in IBB. These awards allow faculty to explore risky new areas of research that might not otherwise receive funding and collect the preliminary data necessary to publish their work or to win increasingly competitive awards from federal agencies. Previous recipients have been able to leverage their initial research, funded by the Hamill Innovation Awards, to attain additional prestigious grants and make further significant discoveries. Some of these achievements include:
- Seven previous Hamill awardees (Drs. Matthew Bennett, Michael Diehl, Michael Kohn, Jane Grande-Allen, Bonnie Bartel, Pedro Alvarez and Dimitri Lapotko) used the data they collected under their Hamill Innovation Awards to win nearly one million dollars in grants each from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
- Based on preliminary results obtained from their Hamill Innovation Awards, several teams have gone on to publish their work in high impact scientific journals including Nature, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- As a result of seed money they received through a Hamill Innovation Award, four IBB faculty members (Drs. Junghae Suh, Jonathan Silberg, Amina Qutub and Laura Segatori) won CAREER awards. This award, from the National Science Foundation, is one of the most prestigious for young scientists. The National Science Foundation also awarded a Hamill team (Drs. Lydia Kavraki and George Bennett) a highly competitive Advances in Bio Informatics Award, worth $700,000, for their proposal based on their Hamill Innovation Award findings.
- Overall, we estimate that the Hamill Foundation's $630,000 investment in the award program since 2005 has leveraged $17.9 million in additional research funds for improved health, better disease detection and treatments as well as environmental wellness.In addition, in February 2010, the IBB's administrative headquarters moved into the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) Building - a move made possible thanks to the $1 million dollar gift from the Hamill Foundation.
On October 31, 2018, Tom Brown, Grants Director of the Hamill Foundation, delivers an award to Matthew Bennett (BioSciences). He was accompanied by IBB Faculty Director Zachary Ball.