Medical grants a boon for Mass.

Massachusetts biomedical researchers are seeing a windfall from federal stimulus money, with the state receiving more in grants from the National Institutes of Health than all others but California.

Margaret Livingstone, a neurobiology professor at Harvard Medical School, said she had been scaling back over the past year and a half, eliminating a full-time technician’s job and spending much of her time writing grants to support her lab.

Through the stimulus funding, however, Livingstone received $390,000 for the first year of a two-year grant that will examine how brain cells react to optical illusions. Eventually, she hopes the work will reveal some of the basics of how vision works. In the short term, she is hiring two postdoctoral researchers…

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