Seventeen projects chosen for new OSU interdisciplinary grant program

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Creative collaboration will be one of the important features in 17 research projects that were recently approved for a total of $500,000 in funding through a new Interdisciplinary Creative Planning Grant Program at Oklahoma State University.

“We were extremely pleased with the response and the quality of the proposals,” said OSU Provost and Senior Vice President Bob Sternberg.  “After receiving 40 proposals, we were able to increase available funding from $350,000 to $500,000, allowing us to award 17 grants that ranged from $21,000 to $41,000 per project.  I’m delighted with the total number of faculty members involved in these collaborative proposals, which hold great promise for advancing scholarly and instructional activities at OSU.”

A total of 172 faculty are involved in the 17 projects. The goal of each project is to integrate two or more academic disciplines from at least two OSU colleges or schools. The projects or programs are research-based, teaching-based, or a combination of both, that help fulfill OSU’s land-grant mission, explained Mark Payton, Regents Service Professor of Statistics and chair of the peer review committee. Project criteria also included collaboration, academic soundness and the potential to attract outside funding.

“There were many outstanding proposals that we were unable to fund. The review committee found the decisions difficult and we wished we could have funded more of the superb ideas that were presented as a result of this program,” said Payton.

By the end of August 2012, the researchers will submit reports summarizing their activities and outcomes, a description of how they serve the land-grant mission, and progress in identifying sustainable external funding sources.

The following are the 17 projects that were awarded funding, listed by title and principal investigators:

·         Entangled Genomes: An Interdisciplinary Program in the Ecology and Evolution of Genomic Interactions, Mark Fishbein, botany;

·         Ecology of Infectious Disease Interdisciplinary Program Planning Grant, Kristen Baum, zoology;

·         ECLIPSE: Environment for Contextualized Learning and insightful Problem-Solving Experiences, Pasha Antonenko, educational studies;

·         Cultural and Biological Adaptations to Grasslands: Towards an Integrative Research and Educational Program, Michael Reiskind, entomology and plant pathology;

·         Nutrition and Early Child Development Program, Tay Kennedy, nutritional sciences;

·         Interdisciplinary Program in Toxicology, Carey Pope, physiological sciences;

·         Interdisciplinary Programs in Homeland Security Science and Technology, Michael Larranaga, fire protection and safety technology;

·         Multidisciplinary Climate Science Institute, Duncan Wilson, natural resource ecology and management;

·         Bridging the 21st Century: Transforming Life Science Instruction through Collaborative, Interdisciplinary Research, Don French, zoology;

·         Phase II of the Bioinformatics Graduate Certificate Program: An Interdisciplinary Training Workshop, Peter Hoyt, biochemistry and molecular biology;

·         A Planning Grant for the Establishment of Interdisciplinary Programs at the School of Entrepreneurship, Spears School of Business, Rubin Pillay, entrepreneurship;

·         iCREST: Interdisciplinary Center for Research Excellence in Science and Technology (Bioinformatics and Computational Biology), Rakesh Kaundal, biochemistry and molecular biology;

·         Multidisciplinary Hybrid (Virtual and Face-to-Face) Teams in Capstone and Senior Design Classes, Dan Tilley, agricultural economics;

·         Molecular and Cellular Biophysics, Rob Burnap, microbiology and molecular genetics;

·         An Interdisciplinary Information Centric Program in Nano and Micro Systems, Joe Cecil, industrial engineering and management;

·         Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Initiative – a Joint Program between OSU-Center for Health Sciences, Tulsa, OSU-Stillwater, and OSU-Tulsa,  David Wallace, pharmacology and forensic sciences;

·         Center for Oklahoma Studies, Mary Larson, library.