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15 faculty awarded Seeding Success Grants in inaugural funding round

The Office of the Provost has announced the inaugural round of grant recipients for the Seeding Success Grant program established in March. Fifteen faculty members across four Vanderbilt schools and colleges will receive support for their work. A complete list of awardees is below.

The Seeding Success Grant is a reinvigoration and expansion of previous programs (replacing the Discovery Grant and Research Scholar Grant programs) and is designed to support faculty research, scholarship and creative endeavors. The grant offers two unique funding tracks:

  • The program serves as a seed opportunity to support work with strong capacity for productivity as well as work with external sponsorship potential from a variety of sources, including federal agencies and corporate or nonprofit foundations.
  • The program also facilitates productivity and scholarship by supporting course buyouts, therefore providing faculty with more time to work on creative projects, manuscripts, papers or strategic grant proposals.

“We received many outstanding applications for seed funding and course buyouts, and we are excited to have an opportunity to support these fantastic proposals,” said Tracey George, vice provost for faculty affairs. “The strong response to the first offering of the new program is a testament to the value of internal funding opportunities and the quality of research, scholarship and creative endeavors among our faculty.”

“The selected faculty are poised to do exactly what this new program promises: seed success by cultivating new projects to drive impact,” added Padma Raghavan, vice provost for research. “In addition to congratulating these awardees, I want to thank the review committee for their in-depth assessments of all proposals.”

For more information about the program, including eligibility standards, proposal requirements and funding guidelines, visit the program website. Questions about the program may be emailed to Annie Hornung. The next funding round will open this fall.

Grant awardees and funding application focus

Seed opportunities

  • Terrah Akard, associate professor of nursing; “Human–animal Interactions to Improve Reading Fluency and Comprehension for Children with or at Risk for Learning Differences”
  • Felipe Barrera-Osorio, associate professor of leadership, policy and organizations; “Long-term Direct and Intra-household Spillover Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program: Experimental Evidence from Colombia”
  • David Braun, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; “Catapult Legs: Enhancing Human Physical Ability with Robotic Limbs”
  • Andrew Coe, assistant professor of political science; “Vanderbilt Laboratory for Research on Conflict and Collective Action”
  • Markus Eberl, associate professor of anthropology; “Machine Learning-based Identification of Ancient Maya Micro-artifacts”
  • Raheleh Filsoofi, assistant professor of art; “The Resonance of the Land: An Intersection of Art, Music and Technology”
  • Duco Jansen, professor of biomedical engineering; “A Novel Imaging-based Approach for Real-time Dosimetry Monitoring During Photodynamic Therapy of Staphylococcus Aureus”
  • Antonia Kaczkurkin, assistant professor of psychology; “Generalized Anxiety Disorder is actually a Mood Disorder: A Pilot Study using a Novel Method for Identifying Data-driven Brain Networks”
  • Eunji Kim, assistant professor of political science; “Revisiting the Power of Fox News”
  • Shihong Lin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; “Single-layer and Conductive Graphene Membrane for Electro-regulated Selective Solute Separation”
  • Odie Lindsey, writer-in-residence in medicine, health and society; “A New Novel About the Blurring of Creative Identity, Commercial–cultural Sellout and the Creolization of the American Music”
  • Cathy Maxwell, assistant professor of nursing; “Mitochondrial Fitness and the AFRESH Wellness Program”

Course buyouts

  • Joanne Golann, assistant professor of public policy and education; “Forming Habit: A Video–ethnography of Everyday Interactions Inside 12 American Families”
  • Lijun Song, associate professor of sociology; “Cutting-edge Network-based Research Purposes”
  • Guillermo Toral, assistant professor of political science; “Democracy on Payroll: Uses and Abuses of Government Jobs in Brazil”