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News Release

Last modified: Thursday, March 3, 2011

18 collaborative projects receive new research funding

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 3, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University Vice President for Research Jorge José has announced that 18 projects involving IU faculty members have been awarded IU Collaborative Research Grants, ranging from $30,000 to $70,000.

The IUCRG program, in its inaugural year, offers seed funding to collaborative projects that cross disciplinary, school, or campus boundaries. More than 160 proposals were received from research teams involving more than 400 IU faculty members. Proposals were reviewed by IU faculty members, who evaluated them on the basis of their excellence, transformative potential, and likelihood for future external funding.

"I am very pleased by the number and quality of proposals we received," José said. "It's clear from the response that IU faculty members are deeply interested in new collaborative opportunities. The decisions were difficult, but the reviewers identified and recommended projects with outstanding potential."

Seven of the funded project teams involve researchers from IU Bloomington and IUPUI. The other 11 project teams involve researchers from different schools on the same campus: eight from IUPUI, two from IU Bloomington, and one team from IU Northwest. Overall, seven IUPUI schools (Medicine, Science, Engineering & Technology, Dentistry, Liberal Arts, Nursing, and Health & Rehabilitation Sciences) and two IU Bloomington schools (College of Arts and Sciences, Informatics and Computing) are represented among the grant recipients.

"The breadth of projects and collaborations is remarkable, as is the involvement of faculty members at all ranks," José said. Almost equal numbers of assistant, associate and full professors are among the 46 faculty members working on IUCRG-funded projects.

IU President Michael A. McRobbie noted the high quality of the proposals as well as the large number of submissions.

"Many of these projects have the potential to produce results that will significantly further our understanding of the world we live in," McRobbie said. "They will do this by leveraging the combined intellectual resources of researchers across a wide variety of disciplines -- an approach that is essential in this era of large, multidisciplinary research grants."

IUCRG recipients will meet early in 2012 to share progress on their work and are required to submit proposals for external funding by September 2012.

Abstracts of projects are available at https://www.iu.edu/~vpr/. IUCRG recipients and project titles are:

• "A Plant Biology Informatics Partnership to Compete in the Emerging Field of Epigenetics," Craig Pikaard (College of Arts and Sciences) and Haixu Tang (School of Informatics and Computing)
• "All-Atom Theory of Virus Behavior: Applications to Vaccine Discovery," Peter Ortoleva (College of Arts and Sciences) and Darren Brown (School of Medicine)
• "Citizen Participation in Environmental Science Studies: Addressing Air Quality Issues in NW Indiana," Julia Peller, Erin Argyilan, and Ellen Szarleta (IU Northwest)
• "Coupling Atmospheric Chemistry with Human Health: A Novel Approach to Investigating the Source of Chronic Childhood Lead Poisoning," Gabriel Filippelli (School of Science) and Sara Pryor (College of Arts and Sciences)
• "Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction from Large-scale Mining of Literature and Patient Records," Lang Li (School of Medicine), Luis Rocha (School of Informatics and Computing), and Jonathan Duke (School of Medicine)
• "Establishment of a Human in vitro Model System for Studies of Usher Syndrome," Jason Meyer (School of Science) and Eri Hashino (School of Medicine)
• "Functional Analysis of Protein Phosphatases in Tumorgenesis and Metastasis," Zhong-Yin Zhang and Weinian Shou (School of Medicine)
• "Injection of Endothelial Colony Forming Cells to Enhance Fracture Repair and Bone Regeneration," Jilian Li (School of Science) and Mervyn Yoder (School of Medicine)
• "Mathematical Modeling of Ocular Blood Flow and Its Relations to Glaucoma," Giovana Guidoboni (School of Science) and Alon Harris (School of Medicine)
• "Microbial Interactions Within Pathogen Vectors and Human Disease Risk," Keith Clay (College of Arts and Sciences), Clay Fuqua (College of Arts and Sciences) and Frank Yang (School of Medicine)
• "Perioperative System Reengineering Program," Bradley Doebbeling (School of Medicine), Jason Saleem (School of Engineering & Technology), Matthew Burton (School of Medicine), Hamid Ekbia (School of Library & Information Sciences), and Mikyoung Lee (School of Nursing)
• "Pilot Initiative to Improve Transfers of Care between Nursing Homes & Emergency Departments," Kevin Terrell (School of Medicine) and Susan Hickman (School of Nursing)
• "Provider Decision-Making For The Management Of Comorbid Pain And Depression: A Novel Virtual Human Technology Investigation," Adam Hirsh (School of Science), Kurt Kroenke (School of Medicine), Matthew Bair (School of Medicine) and Marianne Matthias (School of Liberal Arts)
• "Real-Time Multi-Channel Neural Signal Processor System," Ken Yoshida (School of Engineering & Technology), Jonathan Mills (School of Informatics & Computing) and Richard Eberhart (School of Engineering & Technology)
• "Role of Kalirin in the Local and Central Control of Bone Mass," Angela Bruzzaniti (School of Dentistry), Teresita Bellido (School of Medicine), Ruben Vidal (School of Medicine) and Matthew Allen (School of Medicine)
• "Semiautonomous Decision-Making in Vehicle Emergency Safety Decisions," Kris Hauser (School of Informatics & Computing), Sarah Koskie (School of Engineering & Technology), and Michael Justiss (School of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences)
• "Towards Effectively Quantifying Programming Language Abstraction," Andrew Lumsdaine (School of Informatics & Computing) and Rob Goldstone (College of Arts and Sciences)
• "Understanding Sspc-DNA Interaction Via Chemical, Biochemical, And Structural Biology Studies," Millie Georgiadis (School of Science) and Lei Li (School of Science)

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