LSU President F. King Alexander and two Pennington Biomedical Research Center scientists announced Wednesday the center’s reception of two grants totaling almost $16 million from the United States Department of Defense.
The two grants will extend research programs between Pennington and the Department of Defense that have focused on improving nutrition for soldiers across all branches of the military.
Jennifer Rood, associate executive director for cores and resources at Pennington, said researchers from Pennington have collaborated with the Department of Defense since 1988. The researchers work primarily with other researchers from the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, who focus on improving soldier performance through science and nutrition, Rood said.
Rood’s team of researchers will benefit from $7.3 million from the Collaborative Research to Optimize Warfighter Nutrition II, or CROWN II, project. CROWN II is an extension of the CROWN project, which tried to find ways to improve soldiers’ health in the areas of nutrition and resilience, stress and inflammation, metabolism and behavior.
The other grant — known as Weight Measurements and Standards for Soldiers — will go to a team working on developing an online and mobile application to help soldiers and their families track their nutrition and fitness. WMSS is valued at around $8.3 million.
Tiffany Stewart, who heads the WMSS team at Pennington, said the grant will help them roll out the application  — known as HEALTH — and make it available to United States armed services members and veterans across the globe.
Ret. Col. Karl Friedl, the former director of the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, another collaborator on the HEALTH project, said the work done at Pennington has already had great impacts on the health and nutrition of soldiers in the field.
“We would not be where we are today with regard to nutrition and fitness if it hadn’t been for the work done at Pennington,” Friedl said. “We’re now able to offer our soldiers scientifically based rations, where before, nutrition was not considered a priority.”
Rood and Stewart also highlighted the fact that the grants would allow for more research jobs to be created at Pennington. They said between the two grants, 25 new research positions would be created.