Dr. Stephen Winters-Hilt, recently obtained the prestigious "Career Transition Award For Informatics" from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The $486,000 award, provides almost half a million dollars to cover expenses associated with experiments, post doc/student wages, travel, etc., over the next three years.

Dr. Winters-Hilt does experimental/computational work in nanopore cheminformatics, a very rapidly growing area of nanobiotechnology, as evidenced by Dr. Winters-Hilt also recently becoming co-PI on two very large NIH grants for nanopore detector research (being led by UCSC and Harvard).

Dr. Winters-Hilt also obtained a NSF/EPSCOR grant earlier in the year. Due to the official notification his NIH award being sent at the time of hurricane Katrina, news of the award was overshadowed, when it arrived, by the excellent news that much of the campus was relatively unharmed. Moving forward, this, and other Federal and State funding will play a critical role in helping the UNO CS Department maintain its traditionally strong student body.