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Roughly $1.5 million worth of federal stimulus funding will be coming to Greensboro as part of 556 National Institutes of Health grants handed out across the state this week.

Nationwide, more than 12,000 such grants were given out under one slice of a $787 billion effort to spark the  economy.

In North Carolina, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke landed the lion’s share of the grant funding. Wake Forest University and its health science arm were a distant third, landing 74 grants.

A&T received three of the grants, one of which will create a summer program for students studying life sciences such as chemistry or biology.

“What we want to do is make sure we keep students retained in the biomedical sciences pipeline,” said Goldie Byrd, a biology professor.

Some of the students’ hardest courses come up during their sophomore year, she said. The new program will help prepare them to take on courses such as organic chemistry and will help get them ready for research projects the next year.

The idea, Byrd said, is that students will not only be able to get past some of these “gatekeeper” courses, but earn A’s and B’s and stay on track to graduate in four years as science majors.

“Usually, when our students get past the sophomore year, they do very well,” Byrd said.

At UNCG, kinesiology professor Sandra Shultz will hire a statistician to help her analyze data that may help explain under what conditions knee injuries are more likely to occur, particularly in women.

The grant will “increase the tempo” of research she’s been doing, Shultz said.

“We’re trying to understand the factors that make someone more susceptible to knee injuries,” she said. “We want to ultimately get to prevention strategies.”

Of the grants issued in Greensboro, one private company landed funds. Tanglewood Research received $550,773 to help understand why its All Stars drug abuse prevention program works better in some situations than others.

Every teacher who uses the program adapts it to his or her particular classroom, said researcher William Hansen.

“We’re trying to discover what kinds of adaptations people make that are beneficial and what kind of adaptations don’t work as well,” he said.

President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have said the aim of the stimulus funding is to create and retain jobs. But does funding research really provide that kind of jolt to the economy?

Yes and no, says Andrew Brod, director of UNCG’s Center for Business and Economic Research.

“Is that as stimulative as extending unemployment benefits? Probably not,” Brod said.

Money that goes directly to the people on the lowest end of the economic spectrum gets pumped back into the economy more quickly than anything else, he said.

“And yet, I think it also makes sense to do a stimulus that has an investment element as well,” Brod said.

The research money, he said, will take longer to work its way back into the economy, Brod said. But that longer-term payoff could be useful as the economy works its way back from the recession. “It makes sense as part of a portfolio of different kinds of stimulus spending,” Brod said.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com