AUGUST 3, 2021 — The UTSA Knowledge Enterprise (REDKE) has awarded its annual seed grants to cultivate innovation on campus. Thirty-two faculty members received $555,000 to spark new research projects or advance current programs through the discovery process.
The funding mechanisms are the long-established UTSA Research seed grant programs which include GREAT, INTRA and Connect. The Transdisciplinary Teams Program (T2), awarded with the Provost’s Office, increased its reach this year by supporting five cross-discipline and cross-college research teams. The Brain Health Consortium Collaborative Seed Grant program, launched in collaboration with the UTSA Brain Health Consortium, made its debut this year by funding two cutting-edge research projects.
The annual funding programs support basic and applied research across a range of disciplines: arts, humanities, social sciences, engineering and science. The grants help faculty explore new ideas and new disciplines, support student engagement in research activities, expand scholarly work, create new collaborations in complementary fields, and acquire necessary data to apply for more complex external funding.
This internal financial support successfully yields additional extramural funding from federal agencies. For example, seed grants awards from fiscal year 2019 had a 730% return on investment with the awardees securing an additional $4.1 million in follow-up funding.
“Our established seed grants help foster new collaborations and new perspectives about faculty research and address the bigger, societal challenges we face, whether locally in our city to broader applications across the globe,” explained Jaclyn Shaw, associate vice president for strategic research initiatives, who oversees the award program. “This year’s slate of awardees reflects a wide range of diverse research topics such as school reform, Spanish linguistics, climate change, public safety, and the effects of COVID, particularly in disciplines such as the liberal arts and the humanities.”
“Our funding programs are crucial to enhance the breadth of scholarly and creative activity on campus and expand the research enterprise,” added Bernard Arulanandam, UTSA’s vice president for research, economic development, and knowledge enterprise. “Whatever the field, these research projects add to the cultural fabric and the university’s collective body of knowledge.”
A list of the 32 faculty awards are listed below.
Internal Research Awards (INTRA)
October 1, 2021 through July 31, 2022
$95,000 awarded: $5,000 per researcher x 19 new research projects
College of Architecture, Planning and Construction (CACP)
Ibukun Awolusi
Construction Science
Privacy and Security in the Application of IoT-Based Wearable Sensing Devices for Safety and Health Monitoring in Construction
Jiannan Cai
Construction Science
Understanding and Predicting Worker Behavior in Human-Robot Co-Construction
Jae Yong Suk
Architecture
Investigation of Nighttime Lighting Environment of UTSA Main Campus for Student and Public Safety
Alvarez College of Business (COB)
Hu Harrison Liu
Accounting
Short Selling and Executive Stock Option Exercises
Juan Mao
Accounting
The Impact of COVID-19 on Remote Audits and Group Audits
Krishnamurthy 'K.K' Raman
Accounting
The Effect of Clawback Adoptions on Institutional Investment Decisions
Jennifer Yin
Accounting
Family Firms and Penalized Firm Misconduct
College of Education and Human Development (COEHD)
Claudia Interiano-Shiverdecker
Counseling
Recruitment and Retention of Students in a Bilingual Counseling Certificate Program
College of Liberal and Fine Arts (COLFA)
Paul Ardoin
Philosophy and Classics
Monstrous Becketts
Sue Hum
English
Visualizing the Yellow Peril: Racializing the Chinese, 1834-1941
Ritu Mathur
Political Science and Geography
Security Archives and the Problem of Cyber Arms Control
Pablo Requena
Modern Languages and Literatures
Dialectal variation in the acquisition of Spanish early verb morphology
Omar Valerio-Jimenez
History
Challenging Exclusion in Education: Mexican Americans and School Reform
Oswaldo Zapata
Music
Latin American Music Recording
College for Health, Community and Policy (HCaP)
Ying Huang
Demography
Income Loss and Mental Health Outcomes During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States—Investigating the Moderating Role of Metropolitan Racial Residential Segregation
Kara Joyner
Demography
The Effects of Partisanship on Mate Choices
Se-Woong Park
Kinesiology
Characterizing predictive gaze patterns and brain activity in children with autism spectrum disorder
Sherri Simmons-Horton
Social Work
Perceptions of Current and Former Social Work Students on Anti-Racist Praxis
Tianou Zhang
Kinesiology
The Effects of Nicotinamide Riboside Supplementation and Exercise Training on Body Composition and Physical Performance in Older Adults with Sarcopenic Obesity
Grants for Research Advancement and Transformation (GREAT)
October 1, 2021 through July 31, 2022
Four new research projects were awarded $20,000 for a total of $80,000 through the GREAT program.
Ao Du
COE Civil and Environmental Engineering
Regional Natural Hazard Risk Assessment Methodology toward Resilient 5G Telecommunication Infrastructure Deployment
Murtuza Jadliwala
COS Computer Science
Addressing Security and Privacy Challenges in Visual Augmented Reality (VAR) applications
Angela Lombardi
CACP Architecture
Toward Cultural Heritage Scientific Conservation: Characterization of Spanish Colonial Stones and Lime Mortars in the San Antonio Missions, Texas
Leslie Neely
COEHD Educational Psychology
A step towards smart and connected health in behavior analysis
Connecting through Research Partnerships (Connect)
September 1, 2021 through July 31, 2022
Two teams consisting of one principal investigator from UTSA and one from Southwest Research Institute were each awarded $125,000, for a total of $250,000, with the UTSA PI receiving $50,000 and the SwRI PI receiving $75,000 through the Connect program.
Hai-Cho Han, COE Mechanical Engineering
Keith Bartels, Southwest Research Institute
Modeling the trabecular structure in human heart and its change in heart failure patients
Gary Jacobs, COE Biomedical and Chemical Engineering
Grant Seuser, Southwest Research Institute
CO2 to Fuel: Combining Reverse Water Gas Shift and Fischer Tropsch Synthesis into a Single Reactor
Transdisciplinary Teams (T2) Program
October 1, 2021 through July 31, 2022
The Transdisciplinary Teams (T2) program rewards cross-disciplines teams working together to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and translational innovations that move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem, ultimately advancing UTSA’s institutional research excellence goals and establish a foundation for extramural funding, Five research projects and its lead investigator were each awarded $20,000 for a total of $100,000 through the T2 program.
Rebecca Bria (lead), COLFA Anthropology
Hongjie Xie, COS Geological Sciences
Kristen Brown, COE Civil and Environmental Engineering
Changing Environment in the Glacial Watershed of the Cordillera Blanca, Peru under the Warming Climate: Understanding the shifting local dynamics of water availability, agriculture, and energy production
Teja Guda (lead), COE Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering
Janakiram Seshu, COS Biology
Mario Flores, COE Electrical and Computer Engineering
Microphysiological models of the upper airway to evaluate pathogen resistance
Sue Hum (lead), COLFA English
Rebecca Weston, HCaP Psychology
Aaron Cassil, COS Biology
Greg Elliott, COLFA Art and Art History
Investigating STEM Students' Approaches to Innovative Thinking Through Focus Groups
Angela Lombardi (lead), CACP Architecture
Lorenzo Brancaleon, COS Physics and Astronomy
Arturo Ponce Pedrasa, COS Physics and Astronomy
Paul LeBlanc, COLFA Communication
Cultural Heritage and Climate Change: The biological colonization in the San Antonio Missions — biodeterioration vs. bioprotection debate
Allison Veach (lead), COS Environmental Science and Ecology
Saugata Datta, COS Geology
Corey Sparks, HCaP Demography
Linking the urban microbiome to lawncare choices: How does xeriscaping impact the microbiome?
Brain Health Consortium Collaborative Seed Grant Program
October 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022
The Brain Health Consortium Collaborative Seed Grant program supports a broad range of trans-disciplinary research that may yield fundamental insights into the mechanisms underlying brain disorders. Two research projects were each awarded $15,000 for a total of $30,000.
Brian Hermann
COS Biology
Localization of mammalian spermatogonial stem cells and their niche using spatial genomics
Marzieh Hajiaghamemar
COE Biomedical Engineering
Sport-Related Head Exposures in Female Athletes and Discovery of the Sex-Specific Differences
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