New research grants inspire faculty to ‘swing for the fences’
Monday, May 21, 2018
The Oklahoma State University Office of the Vice President for Research has awarded grants of up to $25,000 to five interdisciplinary research teams under a new program called Swinging for the Fences. The program rewards faculty teams that aggressively pursue research home runs.
The Swinging for the Fences program recognizes that a team of researchers is more likely than any one individual to generate quality research data to submit in a proposal that hits a home run with large external funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and others. The Swinging for the Fences grants will fund the research necessary to collect that data.
“We want to help more OSU researchers become ‘heavy hitters’ in their respective fields,” said Vice President for Research Kenneth Sewell. “By supporting teams of accomplished researchers, we believe that the whole can be greater than the sum or the parts.”
The 2018 Swinging for the Fences recipients, departments and research projects:
- Véronique Lacombe and Michael Davis, both Physiological Sciences – “Novel Large Animal Model of Cardio-Metabolic Disease”
- Dave Lampert, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Jamey Jacob, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering – “Development of an Autonomous Surface Vessel to Monitor Surface Water Resources”
- Akhilesh Ramachandran, Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, Jerry Malayer, Physiological Sciences, Shane Lyon, Veterinary Clinical Sciences, and Brian Couger, High Performance Computing Center – “Evaluation of Chemotherapy on the Microbiome in Dogs Diagnosed with Multicentric B Cell Lymphoma”
- Pankaj Sarin, Materials Science and Engineering, and Khaled Sallam, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering – “Solar-thermal Desalination of Produced Water”
- Edward Shaw and Erika Lutter, both Microbiology and Molecular Genetics – “Establishing the Feasibility of Two Novel Approaches Towards a Q Fever Vaccine”