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News Release

Last modified: Monday, September 12, 2011

IU Bloomington grants spur larger faculty research projects

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 12, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University Bloomington faculty -- both individuals and teams -- are pursuing new scientific initiatives with the support of nearly $1 million in seed funding provided by IU Bloomington's Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR).

The Faculty Research Support Program (FRSP) enables faculty to conduct exploratory research that forms the basis of more ambitious research projects. The specific goals of the FRSP are to support the development, expansion and enhancement of research by IU Bloomington faculty and to improve the faculty's ability to garner external funding for their work. The 2011 FRSP competition received 60 applications. Twenty-one awards will be granted to 30 investigators and more than a dozen collaborators, totaling $867,952.

"The recipients of this year's FRSP awards are an outstanding and wide-ranging group from a dozen different disciplines such as sociology, biology, languages and environmental sciences," said Sarita Soni, vice provost for research at IU Bloomington. "Because OVPR especially aims to encourage collaborative programs, we are particularly pleased that nearly half of the awarded projects feature collaborations. I'm confident that these promising projects will move in innovative directions and will attract external support from funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and others."

"We are extremely pleased to be providing funds to such a diverse group of productive faculty," said Paul Sokol, associate vice provost for research and chair of the FRSP awards committee. "This is just the outcome we hope for when we award support through the FRSP program."

In general, the new research directions yielded by FRSP-funded projects do receive further external funding. Since being awarded his FRSP grant in 2009, for example, evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology at IU Bloomington, has published his research in leading journals such as Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received external awards from the NIH, the NSF and the Department of Defense.

"In 2009, I received a FRSP grant that enabled my lab to make a significant move into a new area of research," Lynch said. "Just 12 months later, the NSF awarded us $1.3 million to further pursue the project in much more detail. The FRSP support was absolute key in enabling my lab to generate the preliminary data necessary for outside funding, and in fact, to do so much more quickly than I had envisioned."

A complete list of funded projects including abstracts is available at research.iub.edu/funding/prog_frsp.shtml. The diverse group of funded projects includes:

• William Hetrick and Dae Jin Kim, with support from Olaf Sporns and Aina Puce (all of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences), are studying the function of the cerebellum, one of the most understudied areas of the brain, in individuals with schizophrenia.
• Raquel Hill and Judy Qiu of the School of Informatics and Computing, and Gilbert Liu of the IU School of Medicine, are employing cloud computing techniques to create secure on-demand computing services for processing health data.
• Jonathan Raff and Jeffrey White, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, are collaborating to assess the contribution of ammonia-oxidizing microbes in soil to nitrous acid in the atmosphere and investigate the role of nitrous acid in both air pollution and climate change.
• Fabio Rojas, Department of Sociology, is surveying nurses to measure what they know about health care-associated infections such as MRSA and compare those findings with an analysis of scientific research regarding health care-associated infections.
• Leonie Moyle and Matthew Hahn, Department of Biology, are sequencing the actively expressed genes from 18 genotypes in the wild tomato group. They will use this data to identify genes associated with ecologically and economically important natural variation across an entire group of diverse but closely related species.

A complete list of 2011 Faculty Research Support Program funding recipients follows:

• James Glazier, Principal Investigator, Department of Physics -- Single-Cell Secretion Monitoring
• William Hetrick, PI, and Dae Jin Kim, with Olaf Sporns and Aina Puce, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences -- Functional brain connectivity in schizophrenia: A cortico-cerebellar approach
• Raquel Hill, PI, and Judy Qui, School of Informatics and Computing; Gilbert Liu, Department of Pediatrics, IU School of Medicine -- Childhood Obesity Studies with Secure Cloud Computing
• Lisa Kaufman, PI, Department of Physics -- Investigation of Neutron Interactions with Xenon
• Chien-Jer Charles Lin, PI, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures -- Floating Thematic Templates and Chinese Sentence Comprehension
• Jody Madeira, PI, Maurer School of Law -- Investigating Fertility Patients' Lived Experience of Informed Consent
• Melanie Marketon, PI, Department of Biology -- Development of a Drosophila infection model to study plague-insect vector dynamics
• Leonie Moyle, PI, Department of Biology, and Matthew Hahn, Department of Biology and School of Informatics and Computing -- Comparative ecological genomics in wild tomatoes using RNA-Seq
• Sharlene Newman, PI, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences -- A developmental study of the embodiment of arithmetic processing
• Judy Qiu, PI, School of Informatics and Computing -- Research in Data Intensive Cloud Programming
• Jonathon Raff, PI, and Jeffrey White, School of Public and Environmental Affairs -- An Assessment of Biogenic Nitrous Acid Production in Soil Using Fluorescence In-Situ Hybridization (FISH) and Cavity Enhanced Absorption Spectroscopy (CEAS)
• Steven Ray, PI, Department of Chemistry -- Novel Optical Detection Techniques for Ion Mobility Spectrometry
• Guilherme Rocha, PI, Department of Statistics -- Application of model selection methods to gene expression data and gene clustering
• Fabio Rojas, PI, Department of Sociology -- What do scientsists know about healthcare associated infections, and when do practitioners listen to them?
• Linda Smith, PI, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences -- The early statistics of visual objects
• Cassidy Sugimoto, PI, School of Library and Information Science -- A new map of knowledge: Using academic genealogy to understand relationships among disciplines
• Jon Urheim, PI, Department of Physics; Stuart Mufson, Department of Astronomy -- Toward a Photon Detection System for a Large Liquid-Argon Neutrino Detector
• Michael Wade, PI, and Armin Moczek, Department of Biology -- Developmental Plasticity Studied Through Metabolomic Profiling
• Claire Walczak, PI, Medical Sciences Program; Roger Innes, Sidney Shaw, and Ke Hu, Department of Biology -- A Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging System for Quantification of Protein Dynamics
• Chen Yu, PI, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences; David Crandall, School of Informatics and Computing -- Understanding Active Vision and Sensorimotor Dynamics in Autistic and Typically Developing Children
• Chen Zhu, PI, Department of Geological Sciences -- Nano Scale Transmission Electron Microscopy Studies of Mineral-Water Interfaces

For inquiries about the program or to speak with Soni or any of the grant recipients, please contact Donna Carter at frsp@indiana.edu.

About the Office of the Vice Provost for Research

The Office of the Vice Provost for Research at Indiana University Bloomington is dedicated to helping faculty develop individual research, scholarly, and creative projects as well as supporting collaborative interdisciplinary research opportunities among faculty, schools, centers, and institutes. For more information, visit research.iub.edu.

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