It didn’t take long for Annie De Groot to make a major impact at URI. Just a few months after being hired as a research professor of biotechnology in 2009, she was awarded a $13 million grant from the National Institutes of Health—one of the largest grants in URI history—to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases.

The lab she had established at the Feinstein Providence Campus, called the Institute for Immunology and Informatics (or iCubed), soon tripled in size to accommodate about a dozen new researchers and students. And she began inviting scientists from around the world to Providence to learn to use the vaccine development tools she invented.

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