Food Scientist Receives $3.67M NIH Grant for Whole Grains Research

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (May 26, 2026) — Shengmin Sang, Ph.D., a food scientist at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, has received a prestigious National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant of $3.67 million over five years to continue his groundbreaking research into whole grains and human health.

“Traditional eating studies use questionnaires and food diaries to measure what people eat. However, these methods do not accurately measure the food intake of different grains and cannot reflect the active compounds in the grain,” said Sang, Distinguished Professor of Functional Foods in N.C. A&T’s College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (CAES). “With the precision nutrition approach used in this study, we should be able to collect more accurate data, measure inter-individual variations of metabolizing whole grains, and discover connections between whole grain consumption and cardiometabolic disease that can improve human health outcomes.”

The health benefits of eating whole grains — foods high in fiber and other nutrients — have long been established, but scientists still do not know exactly how these non-refined grains lower the risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

Sang intends to identify unique bioactive compounds found within barley, corn and brown rice to more accurately measure the intake of each whole grain, then use an epidemiological study to correlate biomarkers in five major whole grains — wheat, oats, barley, corn and brown rice — to risk factors of cardiometabolic disease. His new project continues research he undertook in 2018 that resulted in the identification of unique bioactive compounds within oats and whole grain wheat.

“This award is an outstanding accomplishment and a testament to Dr. Sang’s leadership, innovation, and dedication to advancing research into food as medicine,” said Radiah Minor, Ph.D., interim CAES dean. “We’re looking forward to the important contributions this project will make in understanding nutritional biomarkers and improving public health outcomes.”

Sang is leading this project from the Center for Excellence in Post-Harvest Technologies at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis. His research collaborator is Qi Sun, Ph.D., a Harvard University epidemiologist who serves as director of the Nutritional Biomarker Laboratory at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The Research Project Grant, or R01, is the NIH’s most competitive awards program in biomedical sciences. This latest grant is the sixth R01 award Sang has received during a career investigating functional foods and human health.