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Research office awards seed funding
Seven projects aligned with UB 2020 strategic strengths receive grants
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
Seven research teams have been awarded seed funding through new programs created last fall by Jorge V. José, vice president for research, to encourage and enable increased research and scholarly activity among university faculty and staff.
Four teams received grants through the UB 2020 Scholars Fund; three received "second-chance" funding from the UB 2020 Interdisciplinary Research Development Fund (IRDF). Eight other proposals receiving funding from the IRDF were announced in January.
Proposals from both programs must be for new projects within the 10 areas of strategic strength identified by the UB 2020 strategic planning process.
The reaction to the seed-funding programs has been very positive, José said. "We are very pleased with the response to the IRDF program. The number, range and quality of the submissions exceeded our expectations," he said. "We hope UB faculty will continue to avail themselves of this opportunity, as well as the UB 2020 Scholars Fund program, which is open to all fields, including areas where external funding is rare."
The UB 2020 Scholars Fund awards grants of $1,000 to $15,000 for innovative work by individual investigators in any field of study to develop new projects of high intellectual merit. In the first call for proposals, four awards were made from a field of 20 applicants.
The grants are intended to "provide funding, where such resources are not available from the department, school or college, to allow the development of ideas to enhance the chance of external funding," according to a program description.
"Awards will also be made in areas where external funding is rare," the description states.
The projects receiving UB 2020 Scholars awards are;
"Chashmal": David Felder, Department of Music, investigator. The goal of this project is to create a new, multimedia musical composition entitled "Chashmal." Collaborating with Felder on the project are Elliott Caplan, professor of media study and director, Center for the Moving Image; former UB faculty member and bass vocalist Nicholas Isherwood; UB doctoral candidate and sound designer J.T. Rinker; and Olivier Pasquet of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique. Felder expects to premiere the work on June 9 at the June in Buffalo festival.
"Food Intake Regulation in Women": Christine Pelkman, Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, and Leonard Epstein, Pediatrics, investigators. The project will examine the effects of dietary protein on satiety in women. Researchers will study whether the satiating effects of an essential amino acid, L-phenylalanine, known to elicit an enhanced response from the satiety hormone CCK, is altered by the menstrual cycle.
"A Physical Model for Lesion Dynamics in MS": Surajit Sen, Physics, and Murali Ramanathan, Pharmacy, investigators. The goal of this proposal is to develop and validate a physics-based model for MS disease progression and its relationships to the spatial and temporal dissemination of lesions. The researchers believe that modeling could eventually be used to individualize treatment strategies.
"3-D Buffalo: Constructing a GIS-enabled Spatial-temporal Virtual Reality Model of an Urban Environment": Narushige Shiode and Jean-Claude Thill, Geography, and Li Yin, Urban and Regional Planning, investigators. This project will identify critical elements of 3-D GIS (geographic information systems) modeling of an urban environment, an emerging technology that needs refinement prior to wider implementation in projects aimed at developing a 3-D city model for planning and monitoring a city.
The goal of the IRDF is to encourage collaboration among faculty across disciplines for new research projects that ultimately will attract external grant support.
Kenneth Tramposch, associate vice president for research, explained that during the recent IRDF competition, faculty reviewers found that some of the proposals, while meeting most of the funding criteria, needed some fine-tuning before a funding commitment could be made.
"We saw some great ideas but they were lacking something in terms of feasibility or focus," Tramposch said, noting that in addition to the eight proposals that were accepted for funding, eight were selected for resubmission on March 1 for "second-chance" funding.
"We sat down with the team members and described the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals so they would be in a position to answer the reviewers' concerns."
The following three projects received "second-chance" funding:
"Chemical Microarrays to Identify Cell Specific Ligands for Diagnostic and Therapeutic Applications": Matthew Disney, Chemistry, principal investigator; Terry D. Connell, Microbiology, co-investigator. The goal of the project is to develop general methods to identify ligands that recognize the surface of pathogenic cells using chemical microarrays. These efforts will involve several long-range interdisciplinary collaborations at UB that include the collection of biological data on the ligands that cell surfaces recognize. This information has the potential to enable development of facile medical diagnostics and therapeutics.
"Four Seasons: The Experience of Midlife and Older Adults in the Buffalo Niagara Region": Kathryn Foster, Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth, principal investigator; Daniel Hess, Urban and Regional Planning; Edward Steinfeld, Architecture; Debra Street, Sociology; Anthony Szczygiel, Law; Machiko R. Tomita, Rehabilitation Sciences; and Deborah Waldrop, Social Work, co-investigators. This group will develop and implement a benchmark longitudinal survey of perceptions and experiences of the region's midlife and older adults. The survey will address a range of age-related experiences, including social/health characteristics economic choices and resources, political behavior and the nature of and reliance upon social and cultural networks. Findings are expected to address unresolved theoretical questions cutting across traditional disciplinary interests, exploit linkages to the university's existing core of aging research and be the foundation for cross-disciplinary, cross-national research to follow.
"Optimizing Antibiotic Dosing in Staphylococcus aureus Bloodstream Infection": Brian T. Tsuji, Pharmacy Practice, principal investigator; Alan Forrest and Patrick Smith, Pharmacy Practice; and Alan J. Lesee and Joseph Mylotte, Medicine, co-investigators. The objective of this proposal is to use novel in vitro models to predict optimal dosing regimens for the antibiotic vancomycin that will be effective in the clinical setting. Vancomycin has been the main therapy against deadly, resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, the key bacteria causing bloodstream infection in both the hospital and community setting.