Dr. Butali honored with Presidential Early Career Award
Dr. Azeez Butali, the Gilbert E. Lilly Professor of Diagnostic Sciences, was recognized by the White House with the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award recognizes Butali's pioneering research in the genetics of cleft lip and palate, particularly within African populations, where he is the world's foremost expert.
"It is an honor to be recognized by President Biden and the White House with this award," says Butali, "It truly takes a village, and I cannot thank those enough at the University of Iowa who have supported me and sacrificed to further our research mission. This award is an impetus to do more."
Research Team with Dr. Azeez Butali as Co-Investigator Awarded Grant for over $3 Million
The National Institutes of Health awarded Dr. Richard Smith (Carver College of Medicine) a 5-year grant for over $3.1 million for his team’s project, “Non-Syndromic Hearing Loss - A Collaborative Study.” Dr. Azeez Butali is a co-investigator for the project.
This grant represents the 24th-28th years of funding for Dr. Smith’s project. One primary goal during these years of the overall project is to address a limitation in the team’s prior research in which certain ethnicities were underrepresented.
Dr. Azeez Butali is a co-investigator for the project. He will be coordinating the recruitment of 500 families from Nigeria by working closely with collaborators in Nigeria (at the University of Lagos and the University of Ibadan) on phenotyping, data, and sample collection. He will also assist in the analyses and interpretation of genetics and genomics data that will be generated following sequencing of these families in order to identify variants and genes that contribute to non-syndromic hearing loss.
Other co-investigators for the project include Akeem Lasisi, E. Ann Black-Ziegelbein, Cynthia Morton, Jun Shen, W. Daniel Walls, Uli Mueller, and Suzanne Leal.
Dr. Gowans Receives Grant totaling over $450K from the NIH
The National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research awarded Dr. Lord Jephthah Joojo Gowans an Emerging Global Leader Award (K43), which is a training grant for junior faculty from countries such as Ghana, where Dr. Gowans resides. Dr. Gowans’ primary US mentor for the grant is Dr. Azeez Butali, associate professor in the Department of Oral Pathology, Radiology, and Medicine.
Dr. Gowans is currently a faculty member at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, Ghana, and he has conducted a great deal of his Ph.D. research at Iowa and he has worked extensively in Dr. Jeff Murray and Dr. Azeez Butali’s labs.
Dr. Gowans’ overall research is focused on the etiology of birth defects, particularly craniofacial and dental anomalies and he employs genetic, genomics, developmental biology and other functional genomics tools in his research.
For this project, he is studying nonsyndromic orofacial clefts in multiplex families and families with twins from Africa, since such families benefit from the detection of probable etiologic variants. The goal of the project is to determine genetic and environmental risk factors that predispose Africans to craniofacial and dental anomalies, which may subsequently be extrapolated to other human populations.
Normally faculty at Dr. Gowans’ institution dedicate about 70% of their time to teaching and instruction, will little time remaining for research. This award allows Dr. Gowans to spend 75% of his time conducting research, thereby freeing him up to contribute to the larger clefting research programs around the world. The long-term aim is for Dr. Gowans to develop a research profile that allows him to study a greater number of orofacial cleft multiplex families and twins discordant for orofacial clefts across the whole of Africa.
Dr. Azeez Butali Receives 5-year Grant for Over $3.2M
Feb 28, 2020 - The National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research awarded Dr. Azeez Butali, associate professor in the Department of Oral Pathology, Radiology, and Medicine, a 5-year grant exceeding $3.2M. Dr. Butali’s project, “Refining the Genetic and Genomic Architecture of Non-syndromic Orofacial Clefts,” aims to identify new genetic variants of cleft lip (with or without cleft palate—CL/P) in African populations with the goal of providing new insight into the pathogenesis of CL/P.
This project is part of Dr. Butali’s long-term goal of identifying the genetic, genomic, and environmental factors in the etiology of orofacial clefts in families of African descent. Although genetic studies of cleft lip among family of Northern European and Asian descent have revealed several genetic factors at work in cleft lip, there have been few studies on families of African descent.
This project builds on earlier research from the Butali team, which identified several genetics factors of cleft lip in African populations, and seeks to identify more.
The project has three specific aims:
To replicate and conduct a meta-analysis of variants found in genome-wide association studies for CL/P and cleft palate only (CPO).
To perform analyses of completed whole genome sequencing (WGS) of 150 CL/P case-parent triads from Africa, and to identify functional variants that are rare and contribute to bilateral cleft lip and plate in African populations.
To conduct mechanistic analyses of genome-wide significant SNPs from the Butali’s lab’s African genome-wide association study.