Victoria Bautch (seated, center) with members of her research lab.

Victoria Bautch, chair of the biology department, has been awarded a $6 million Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NIH-NHLBI).

Bautch is the Beverly Long Chapin Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and co-director of the UNC McAllister Heart Institute. She is also a member of the Integrative Program for Biological and Genome Sciences (iBGS) and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The NIH-NHLBI provides global leadership in research, training and education to prevent and treat heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders.

The award will support the research of Bautch’s lab, which centers on the molecules and processes that control development and disease. The lab’s major focus is the study of how blood vessels form and are patterned during development, and how these processes are disturbed or co-opted during diseases such as cancer.

The project, “Molecular and Cellular Control of Angiogenesis,” will allow Bautch and colleagues to open new directions in understanding how blood vessels form during development and function in the adult.