BATON ROUGE — LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center has received an additional five years of funding for its obesity and nutrition research. 

The $5.66 million renewal of its Nutrition Obesity Research Center grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases is the fifth time Pennington's funding for the research has been renewed.

With the new renewal, the research is funded through 2031, a spokesperson for Pennington said. 

"This renewal recognizes the strength of the collaborative research community we have built over the past two decades," LSU Boyd Professor Dr. Eric Ravussi, who leads the program, said. "For more than 20 years, the NORC has helped build one of the nation's premier environments for nutrition and obesity research. By bringing together investigators with complementary expertise and providing them with world-class scientific resources, we've created an environment where innovative ideas can grow into discoveries that improve health."

The Pennington-Louisiana NORC is one of only 11 NIH-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Centers in the United States that also includes programs at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Washington University in St. Louis and other leading research institutions.