Spring 2019 Seed Grant Award Winners
Below are the winners of the Spring 2019 Seed Grant Program Competition. Faculty were asked to submit an abstract, a five-page proposal as well a timeline showing how this seed funding would help to develop a highly competitive proposal for extramural funding. 56 applications were received spanning the School of Medicine, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, College of Engineering, and the College of Arts and Sciences. The following projects were selected for funding with an award start date of June 3, 2019.
Alfredo Fontanini and Giancarlo La Camera, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior with their proposal: Cortical clusters formation underlying the neural coding of expectation
Jeffrey Ge, Mechanical Engineering, Daniel Birk, Department of Neurosurgery; Nilanjan Chakraborty and Shikui Chen, Department of Mechanical Engineering; David Rubenstein, Department of Biomedical Engineering; and T. A. Venkatesh, Department of Materials and Chemical Science Chemistry with their proposal: Towards a Bionic Spine: Kinodynamic Holistic Spine Modeling and Development of Novel Implants for Spinal Restoration
Gabrielle Russo, Department of Anthropology and Isaiah Nengo, Turkana Basin Institute with their proposal: Paleontological reconnaissance at Napenagila South: a new potentially early Miocene primate site in West Turkana, Turkana Basin, Kenya
Stacey Scott, Kristin Bernard, Department of Psychology, and Krishna R. Veeramah, Department of Ecology & Evolution with their proposal: Integrating Epigenomics with Life Stress Measurement to Predict Accelerated Aging
Flaminia Talos, Department of Urology and Pathology and Daifeng Wang, Department of Biomedical Informatics with their proposal: A new bladder cancer model based on tissue reprogramming and gene targeting
Stella Tsirka Department of Pharmacological Sciences and John Haley, Department of Pathology with their proposal: Feasibility Studies for small molecule inhibitors targeting Neuropilin-1 in glioma
Laura Wehrmann, School of Marine and Atmospheric with her proposal: First insights into the biogeochemical cycling of (bioessential) trace metals in the proglacial zones of Arctic glaciers (Coastal Svalbard, Norway)
Tzu-Chieh Wei and Dominik Schneble, Department of Physics and Astronomy with their proposal: Harnessing a Novel Ultracold-Atom Platform for Quantum Simulations and Information Processing