The Office of Research’s seed grant initiatives provide funding for faculty across various disciplines. The University’s award from the State of Texas National Research University Fund (NRUF) has helped us afford these internal funding opportunities. Congratulations to this year’s recipients:

Seed Program for Interdisciplinary Research (SPIRe)

The Marriage of Two-Dimensional Materials and Topological Insulators

$100,000

  • Bing Lv (Assistant Professor, Physics, UTD)
  • William Vandenberghe, co-PI (Assistant Professor, Materials Science & Engineering, UTD)

Analyzing Propaganda through Human/Machine Coding

$100,000

  • Monica Rankin (Associate Professor, Arts and Humanities, UTD)
  • Vincent Ng, co-PI (Professor, Computer Science, UTD)

Machine Learning Guided Molecular Design for Indoor Light Harvesting

$100,000

  • Miheala Stefan (Professor, Chemistry, UTD)
  • Julia Hsu (Professor, Materials Science & Engineering, UTD)
  • Jessica Ouyang (Assistant Professor, Computer Science, UTD)

Humanities and Emerging Arts Grant (HEArts)

Marie Bonaparte and Feminist Psychoanalysis for the Present

$10,000

  • Shilyh Warren (Professor, Arts and Humanities, UTD)

Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science

$10,000

  • Matthew Brown (Associate Professor, Arts and Humanities, UTD)

Social Sciences Grant

A Cross-Country Survey Experiment on Public Attitudes Toward Abusing Human Rights

$10,000

  • Rebecca Cordell (Assistant Professor, Political Sciences, UTD)

Shattering the Glass-Ceiling: Does Leadership Style Matter?

$10,000

  • Sheryl Skaggs (Professor, Sociology, UTD)
  • Meghna Sabharwal, co-PI (Professor, Public and Nonprofit Management, UTD)
  • Lynne Vieraitis, co-PI (Professor, Criminology, UTD)

Workshop Grant

Workshop on Mathematical Billiards

$5,000

  • Oleg Makarenkov (Professor, Mathematical Sciences, UTD)
  • Maxim Arnold (Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences, UTD)
  • Vladimir Dragovic (Professor, Mathematical Sciences, UTD)

New Faculty Research Symposium

Defining the Role of the Microbiome in Recurrent UTI: A Bayesian approach

$25,000

  • Qiwei Li (Professor, Statistics, UTD)
  • Nicole De Nisco, co-PI (Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences, UTD)

Market Sensing with Cryptocurrency Chainlets: Can We Learn More on the Traditional Economy from Non-Traditional Blockchain Data Sources

$25,000

  • Irina Panovska (Professor, Economics, UTD)
  • Yulia Gel, co-PI (Professor, Mathematical Sciences, UTD)
  • Asim Day (Research Associate, Mathematical Sciences, UTD)
  • Murat Kantarcioglu (Professor, Computer Science, UTD)
  • Victor Valcarcel (Professor, Economics, UTD)