Nine faculty selected to receive seed grants

The Office of Research has awarded nine faculty with 2022 New Faculty Seed Grants.

The grant program provides support for junior faculty to develop research, scholarly, or creative programs that lead to sustained professional development and extramural funding. The program is sponsored by the Office of Research and the Office of the Provost.

Since the New Faculty Seed Grant program began in 2000, junior faculty have submitted 963 proposals to the program. Of these, 279 awards were given with $4.75 million invested in the program. Over the years, seed grant winners have submitted 734 external proposals related to their projects, bringing in over $49.4 million in externally funded awards.

The 2022 New Faculty Seed Grant recipients are:

  • John Blong, Department of Anthropology, will apply a novel suite of methods to investigate how prehistoric people in the Great Basin region of western North America maintained food systems over millennia of climate change.
  • Andra Chastain, Department of History, will research how urban air pollution is represented, experienced, and ultimately understood as a public health crisis in Santiago, Chile; Mexico City; and Los Angeles.
  • Pilar Fernandez, Paul G. Allen School for Global Health, will assess the threat represented by pathogens circulating in rodents and how this threat might translate to disease risk in humans.
  • Marcos Marcondes, Department of Animal Sciences, will evaluate mammary gland development and lactation performance on dairy heifers submitted to injections or recombinant somatotropin or rbST, also known as bovine growth hormone, during pre-puberty compared to traditional management.
  • Shikha Prashad, Department of Kinesiology and Educational Psychology, will examine the role of age-related decline in working memory on two specific processes that underlie motor skill acquisition, which will lead to the development of effective interventions to facilitate independent living and improve the quality of life of older adults.
  • Alana Pulay, School of Design and Construction, will collect data that utilizes the Individualized Classroom Assessment Scoring System to determine the appropriate correlated color temperature of LED lighting in classrooms, which will be used to inform current design practices and aid policymakers in developing recommendations about appropriate lighting.
  • Kaiyan Qiu, School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, will design, fabricate, test, and optimize a flexible 3D-printed biomimetic sharkskin with drag reducing attributes and antimicrobial properties for underwater applications for future use of underwater soft robots and clothing.
  • Jeff Walls, Department of Educational Leadership and Sport Management, will explore the ethical basis of decision-making in schools through the lens of organizational ethical climate and teachers’ experience of moral distress.
  • Jacqueline Wilson, School of Music, will create an album of works for the bassoon by Māori composers to bring new depth to the Indigenous representation in the bassoon repertoire, combat monolithic racial depictions, and promote artistic sovereignty.

Full descriptions of these projects are available online.

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