A Closer Look at BSOS Faculty's Grand Challenges Grants Projects

In February the University of Maryland’s Grand Challenges Grants Program invested $30 million in ideas designed to address the world’s most complex problems.

More than a dozen BSOS researchers are helping execute such ideas by serving on projects that have earned either:

• Institutional Grants of $1 million per year for three years of funding;

• Impact Awards of $250,000 per year for two years of funding;

• Team Project Awards of $500,000 per year for three years of funding; or

• Individual Project Awards of up to $50,000 per year for three years of funding.

The college community celebrates these researchers and their innovative work.

DEMOCRACY INITIATIVE: DEMOCRACY RESEARCH, EDUCATION & CIVIC ACTION
Professor Michael Hanmer of the Department of Government and Politics (GVPT), who also directs the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, and colleagues in the College of Education, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and School of Public Policy will use an Impact Award to create a Democracy Initiative. This project catalyzes interdisciplinary innovation to increase trust in our election system, our public schools, the news media, and more. The Democracy Initiative will do so by providing cutting-edge research, innovative teaching and learning, and impactful civic engagement.

RELATING ATTITUDES ON DEMOCRACY TO ATTITUDES ON RACE AND ETHNICITY
Building on his earlier work with the UMD Critical Issues Poll, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development Shibley Telhami (GVPT) will use an Individual Project Award to produce additional polls focused on two critical issues of the day. The first is attitudes about threats to American democracy and their impact on American foreign policy. The second is shifting attitudes on racial/ethnic/religious relations in America. The polls will occur over a three-year period of study that spans the 2024 national elections, and there will be at least one annual publication analyzing the results.

CLIMATE CHANGE & POLITICAL CONFLICT: IMPACT OF RISING SEA TEMPERATURE ON THE SECURITY OF 109 COASTAL NATIONS
Building on prior research, which found that sea surface temperature (SST) is a significant predictor of maritime piracy, Distinguished University Professor Gary LaFree of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice will use a new Individual Project Award to study SST as a measure of climate change. He will examine its impact on various types of political violence in 109 countries with coastlines. His findings may enable projections of the nature of future threats connected to climate-change induced shifts in food production.

ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHALLENGES, PURSUING SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS
Distinguished University Professor Ellen Williams of the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences (CMNS) was awarded an Institutional Grant for a multi-person project—of which Professor and Chair Tatiana Loboda of the Department of Geographical Sciences (GEOG) is a part. This project focuses on translating climate science to practice, and on offering experiential research opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students interested in pursuing multidisciplinary solutions to climate change. The project will heavily rely on the strength of existing campus research, which includes work concerning the monitoring and forecasting of extreme events, climate adaptations for agriculture, and the monitoring of air and water pollution globally, and in the state of Maryland.

CLIMATE MITIGATION AND LAND-USE: DETECTION AND MONITORING OF SECOND-GENERATION BIOFUEL CROPS IN THE UNITED STATES
To meet climate change mitigation goals, researchers are exploring second-generation biofuel crops such as switchgrass, which is able to grow on marginal lands without displacing food crops. However, the current spatial extent and usage of switchgrass is not well-quantified, and the unprecedented areas of future land-use change projected for these crops has the potential to impact biodiversity, water cycles, and food security. Via an Individual Project Award, Associate Research Professor Louise Chini (GEOG) will use remote sensing data to develop detection and monitoring technologies for switchgrass and its conversions from previous land-use/cover, to help inform future climate mitigation decision-making.

ANTI-BLACK RACISM INITIATIVE
Assistant Research Professor Jeanette Snider and Professor Rashawn Ray of the Department of Sociology will work with Lecturer Ashley Newby and Professor John Drabinski of the Department of African American Studies on a Team Project Award that will position UMD as a leading anti-Black racism institution. They will do so by developing faculty-student, cross-departmental, anti-Black racism-focused research projects; developing and executing anti-Black racism teach-in workshops for faculty, staff, students, and community members; and presenting research findings to the wider campus and local community through an annual symposia and networking event. These efforts will also amplify the Minor in Anti-Black Racism—a collaboration between BSOS, the College of Arts and Humanities, the College of Education, the School of Public Health, and the School of Public Policy—that is set to launch in Fall 2023.

AFRICA THROUGH LANGUAGE AND AREA STUDIES (ATLAS)
Through their Team Project Award, Miranda Abadir from the UMD National Foreign Language Center and Assistant Professor Matthew Thomann of the Department of Anthropology will create a website, called ATLAS, which will increase the understanding of the African continent and its growing global influence. ATLAS will reduce disparities in representation, increase the prominence of African and African American topics of study and encourage more scholarship on Africa by centralizing all UMD research, scholarship, courses, events and student groups focused on Africa. ATLAS will also host a monthly lecture series and an annual conference on the study of Africa, bringing together interested faculty, staff and students and attracting African thought leaders and scholars to engage with the UMD community.

MARYLAND INITIATIVE FOR LITERACY & EQUITY (MILE)
An Institutional Grant was awarded to Associate Professor Donald Bolger of the College of Education and a team of faculty across campus—including Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) faculty members. These HESP faculty are: Professor and Chair Rochelle Newman, Professor Nan Bernstein Ratner, Assistant Clinical Professor Eliza Thompson, and Clinical Assistant Professor José Ortiz, who is also Director of the Language-Learning Early Advantage Program. The researchers aim to increase literacy and shrink achievement gaps in schools. They will use cutting-edge models of professional development and community outreach to transform and integrate practices in education, speech pathology, library sciences, and parent/family engagement. They will contextualize their findings with respect to marginalized communities across race, culture, ethnicity, and language, as well as neurodiverse populations.

FOSTERING INCLUSIVITY THROUGH TECHNOLOGY (FIT)
Through their Team Project Award, Associate Professor Yi Ting Huang and Clinical Associate Professor Kathy Dow-Burger (HESP); Associate Professor Elizabeth Redcay of the Department of Psychology (PSYC); and Quentin Leifer, a master’s student in the College of Education, will build a video-calling platform called Fostering Inclusivity through Technology (FIT). FIT will promote mutual understanding between people with autism spectrum disorder and their workplace peers by highlighting team sentiment, building rapport with strangers, connecting past and current topics in conversations, and unobtrusively identifying and resolving misunderstandings.

ESTABLISHING A ROLE FOR PSILOCYBIN IN FRONTAL LOBE FUNCTION
Through his Individual Project Award, Assistant Research Professor Adam Brockett of the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) will use the UMD Brain and Behavior Institute’s Small Animal Magnetic Resonance Imaging facility to explore how a single dose of psilocybin—a psychedelic used for the treatment of depression and other mood disorders—alters decision-making and its related brain areas in rodents.

ROLE OF MITOCHONDRIA DYNAMICS IN OPIOID ADDICTION
Assistant Professor Anna Li (NACS, PSYC) will use her Individual Project Award to help reduce rates of opioid relapse. Using a rat model, Li will investigate the role of mitochondrial dynamics and associated cellular signaling pathways underlying oxycodone relapse. This work will advance our understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying oxycodone relapse, and could help to uncover potential therapeutic targets for prevention.

VALUES-CENTERED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Through an Impact Award to Professor Hal Daumé III of the A. James Clark School of Engineering and other UMD colleagues, Assistant Professor Eric Hoover (HESP) joins an 18-person research team in promoting the development of AI in a way that is ethical, transparent, fair, trustworthy, supportive of human creativity, and able to facilitate privacy. This work is especially important for the continued use of AI in areas such as education, healthcare, and more. The researchers will bring together experts in AI to develop new technology that is responsive to relevant human concerns; in philosophy, to develop tools for representing and reasoning substantively about values; and in human-computer interaction, to better adapt AI systems to people.

Published on Fri, Jun 23, 2023 - 1:45PM