Our research effort could expand and become much more sophisticated through increased awareness and financial support. You can help! There are many ways that we could benefit from your direct support of what we are doing, and we have come up with the acronym AIDE to summarize the terms Advocate, Innovate, Donate and Educate. Anything you feel you could do to support what we are doing will be welcome and greatly appreciated.
advocate
Much of our past and current funding comes from grants we have received from the National Institutes of Health and other disease-focused Foundations. Over the past several years, these funding sources have struggled to maintain their previous levels of funding and competition for the more limited supply of money has increased dramatically. These organizations need to have the support of the public to be able to do what they do best, which is to provide a steady source of income for labs such as ours. Whenever someone gives to a foundation or calls a congressperson to express their interest in continuing funding for medical research, it helps all of us who are doing that work.
INNOVATE
We are always looking for ways to improve our research efforts and increase interest in the work we are doing. If you have scientific ideas that you think would contribute to the success of our lab, please share them with us by contacting Steve Lundy via email at sklundy@umich.edu. We also would welcome innovative content contributions to our website that would enhance our profile and the experience of our visitors. These could be web videos, original songs, drawings, photographs, links to or from related websites, or even an interactive video game in which killer B cells are fighting off the “bad guy” T cells. Send an outline of your ideas to us and we will let you know if they are something we think would be beneficial.
Donate
Maintaining funding for a research lab like ours can be an enormous challenge. This is especially true in times of austerity such as those we have all experienced in the past decade. You might be surprised to learn that funding for our lab or most other individual biomedical labs at universities in the United States does not come from college tuition, hospital billing, or state tax dollars. Instead, labs like ours are funded by the National Institutes of Health, disease-focused charitable foundations, contracts from pharmaceutical industry sponsors, and private donations from individuals. Most of these sources of funding have priorities that they are focused on supporting, which may or may not be what you would like them to concentrate on. If you are interested in supporting the work that our lab is doing, you may want to consider a direct donation to our research projects. We have recently established a Killer Cures for Allergies and Autoimmunity Fund at the University of Michigan Medical School. Through this fund we are now able to accept tax-deductible charitable donations from people like you. Every dollar you donate will go directly toward supporting our research efforts, and the university will oversee that we are being careful not to waste or misuse your money. To donate, send a check payable to the Regents of the University of Michigan with a notation that it is for the Lundy Lab Killer Cures Fund. Address your letter to the Department of Internal Medicine-Rheumatology, attn: Carrie Mell, Room 7C27, 300 North Ingalls Bldg., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-5422
educate
One of our most important goals is to educate as many people as possible about immunology and to be a resource of information to the general public. You may be interested in checking out our blog page on this website entitled: "Immunology Demystified". There we have a forum for explaining in not too technical terms some facts about the immune system and killer B cells and to take comments or questions from you. We would be very happy to receive questions you may have about the work we do and about other topics related to immunology, diseases and medical research. As members of the vibrant immunology community at the University of Michigan Medical School, we have access to a vast amount of expertise on just about any topic. So if we don't know the answers to your questions, we'll find someone who does. We hope that through openness and sharing what we know with you, that you in turn will help us spread the word about the importance of our work and the larger field of immunology research to your friends. To learn more about the immune system or to ask questions of us or our expert colleagues you can link to our blog posts...click here.