The results for fiscal 2000 show that the college, at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, received nearly $1.6 million from the NIH for projects in its Department of Orthopaedics, chaired by Vincent D. Pellegrini, Jr., MD, professor of orthopaedics. The department’s activities include patient care, graduate medical education and academic pursuits that further knowledge about orthopaedic disease through clinically relevant medical research. Orthopaedics deals with the prevention or correction of injuries or disorders of the skeletal system and associated muscles, joints and ligaments.

The top three medical schools in the orthopaedics category of the NIH funding report are based at Case Western Reserve University ($2.8 million), the University of Rochester ($2.1 million) and Yale University ($2 million). The number five school on the list is at the University of California at San Francisco ($1.4 million). Other Pennsylvania schools represented on the list are based at the University of Pennsylvania (6th with $1.2 million), Thomas Jefferson University (8th with nearly $930,000) and the University of Pittsburgh (12th with nearly $782,400).

The NIH is the focal medical research arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and conducts its own studies in addition to supporting work at non-federal research institutions throughout the country and abroad. Its home page is at http://www.nih.gov/. The full list of the 32 medical schools that received NIH funding in the orthopaedics category, as well as all schools ranked by the funding they received in other research categories, may be found at http://silk.nih.gov/public/cbz2zoz.@www.med.depts.fy2000.dsncc. More information on Penn State’s Department of Orthopaedics is at http://www.hmc.psu.edu/ortho_rehab/.

**gwc**

Contact:  Gary W. Cramer, Department of Public Information, at (814) 865-7517 or gwc104@psu.edu