Arts & Sciences Announces Winners of First Wave of Seed and Planning Grants

The University of Virginia’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences has announced the inaugural recipients of its Seed and Planning Grants, a new award program supporting faculty research and innovation. The initiative is part of Arts & Sciences’ strategic plan to commit $25 million in resources to advance groundbreaking research over the next three years. Additionally, the Brain Institute provided $75,000 to co-fund three seed grants in alignment with the Institute’s mission to pursue neuroscience discovery in service of society.  

“These grants provide faculty with crucial resources to launch promising new research projects and to enable competitive proposals for external funding,” said Laura Galloway, associate dean for research in Arts & Sciences. “By investing in our faculty’s ideas, we’re fostering innovation and ensuring UVA Arts & Sciences remains at the forefront of discovery across disciplines.”

The seed grants, which are open to faculty in all A&S disciplines from politics and music to psychology and astronomy, allow researchers to gather preliminary data for future external grant applications, while planning grants provide faculty with time and resources as they apply for large-scale funding opportunities. A total of 37.5% of the proposals for seed grants in the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences and 35.2% of the proposals for seed grants in the Sciences were funded. Half of the proposals for planning grants were funded, with awards ranging from $20,000 to $75,000.

Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, an associate professor of politics, was awarded an A&S Seed Grant to develop an innovative new research program to investigate the role of online citizen journalism in fostering trust, civic engagement and effective local governance as confidence in traditional journalism is eroding around the globe.

“I was thrilled to receive this support from the A&S Seed and Planning grant program. It comes at a critical juncture, as I am starting up a new research program on citizen use of digital technology in unequal democracies,” Kruks-Wisner said. “The grant will enable our research team to carry out exploratory work in India on citizen journalism and local governance, helping us refine research questions in collaboration with a community media NGO.”

Bethany Teachman, a professor of psychology who received an A&S Planning Grant, stressed the importance of institutional support in preparing competitive proposals that could significantly impact the University community.  If approved, her grant will fund a research center at UVA aimed at improving technology designed to build social connections to better support youth struggling with emotional disorders like depression and anxiety.

“Writing a center-level grant of this scale and scope can feel very daunting, so we are extremely grateful for this support from Arts & Sciences,” Teachman said. “I can’t imagine taking on this challenge without this planning grant to help move the program of research forward.”

For scientists working across disciplinary boundaries, seed grants provide critical pilot funding necessary to attract additional funding from outside the University. Daniel Meliza, an associate professor of psychology, works at the intersection of genetics and neurodevelopment. Seed grant funding will support his work with assistant professor of biology John Campbell to pioneer new research techniques.

“This grant is a huge and timely boost to an exciting collaboration between the Meliza and Campbell labs,” he said. “We are going to employ cutting-edge transcriptomic methods to study how a gene implicated in dyslexia affects a key stage in auditory development when birds, like humans, are learning the structure and nuances of their species' vocalizations. The funding will enable us to pilot these techniques and will really bolster our competitiveness for NIH funding.”

The inaugural cohort of grant Seed and Planning Grant recipients include:

Seed Grants – Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

• Sonia Alconini (Anthropology)
  • Project Title: The Inka Provincial Capital of Samipata in the Southeastern Inka Frontier
• Christopher L. Carter (Politics)
  • Co-PI: Daniel W. Gingerich (History)
  • Project Title: Machines of State: Government-Linked Firms under Occupation
• Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner (Politics)
  • Project Title: Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age: Trust, Action, and Local Civic Engagement

Seed Grants – Sciences

• Alan Bergland (Biology)
  • Project Title: Unraveling the Genetic Architecture of an Adaptive Inversion
• Christopher Deppmann (Biology)
  • Project Title: Hypothalamic Architecture and Feeding Setpoints: Circuit-Level Adaptations to Dietary Challenge
  • This project was co-funded by The Brain Institute
• Ali D. Güler (Biology
  • Co-PI: Edward Nieh (Pharmacology)
  • Project Title: Functional Neurocircuit Mapping of GLP1R Agonist Weight Loss Drugs
  • This project was co-funded by The Brain Institute
• Jennifer L. Güler (Biology)
  • Co-PIs: Fatima Nogueira (Universidad Nova de Lisboa), Lina Antunes (Hospital Central do Lubango)
  • Project Title: Partnering with Malaria-Endemic Countries to Facilitate Antimalarial Resistance Monitoring
• Robert Hirosky (Physics)
  • Project Title: Precision Readout for Homogeneous Crystal Calorimetry
• C. Daniel Meliza (Psychology)
  • Co-PI: John Campbell (Biology)
  • Project Title: Dyslexia and the Role of KIAA0319 in Auditory Development
  • This project was co-funded by The Brain Institute
• Shazrene Mohamed (Astronomy)
  • Co-PIs: Maryam Modjaz (Astronomy), Poonam Chandra (NRAO and Astronomy)
  • Project Title: Developing an Innovative Framework for Assessing the Impact of Binary Stars on Interacting Supernovae: Panchromatic Observations Meet 3-D Simulations
• Ariel Pani (Biology)
  • Co-PI: Melanie Worley (Biology)
  • Project Title: Developing Genomic and Molecular Toolkits for the Ghost Acoel, a Transparent Model System for Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology
• David M. Parichy (Biology)
  • Project Title: Immunoprotective Roles of Vertebrate Pigment Cells
• Michelle Personick (Chemistry)
  • Co-PIs: Jihye Kim (Colorado School of Mines), Rebecca Smaha (National Renewable Energy Lab)
  • Project Title: Parallel Screening of Conditions for the Electrodeposition of Multimetallic Nanoparticles; Pilot Data for a Collaborative Proposal on Critical Element Recovery from Waste Streams
• Xi Yang (Environmental Sciences)
  • Project Title: Tree Detective: Tracking Tree Mortality in the Southwestern United States Using High-Resolution Remote Sensing and Deep Learning
• Huiyuan Zhu (Chemistry)
• Project Title: Enabling a Circuit Economy from CO2 and Nitrate Wastes: Tailoring Single-Atom and Host Metal Interactions for Electrocatalytic C-N Coupling with Explainable AI

 Planning Grants

• Kevin Driscoll (Media Studies)
  • Co-PI: Rafael Alvarado (Data Science)
  • Project Title: UVA Center for Language and Artificial Intelligence
• Bonnie Gordon (Music)
  • Co-PIs: Nomi Dave (Music), Annie Coughlin (Law)
  • Project Title: The Sound Justice Center
• Bethany Teachman (Psychology)
  • Co-PIs: Laura Barnes (Engineering), Nancy Deutsch (Education), Inbal Billie (U of Michigan)
  • Project Title: Harnessing the Power of Personalization and Social Connections in Digital Interventions for Youth with Disorders of Emotion