Five ODU Teams Win Multidisciplinary Research Seed Grants
What research topics are likely to gain traction at Old Dominion University in the next few years? One answer to that question comes each fall with the announcement of awards from the Office of Research's Multidisciplinary Seed Grant Program.
Winners named this week for the 2010 research year include two teams doing work at or near the nanoscale. Other teams are probing serious uses of online gaming and devising new ways to manage emerging, complex risks. And one team is developing a model of how chronic disease in finfish is influenced by ecological factors.
The awards to the five teams totaled almost $320,000. The teams include 16 ODU researchers and three collaborators from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS).
The grants were announced by Mohammad Karim, vice president for research. This is round five of a program Karim initiated in 2005 to promote multidisciplinary research projects. The goal is to nurture projects to the point that they can attract external funding.
Karen Eck, ODU's director of research development, said the winning projects were selected from 16 applications. A total of 56 ODU faculty members and six non-ODU collaborators were on the applicant teams.
The teams/projects selected for funding by the research office's panel of reviewers are (unless otherwise noted, the investigators are from ODU and are identified by the departments and/or centers they represent):
Hongwei Zhu (Information Technology and Decision Science), Yuzhong Shen (Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center and Electrical and Computer Engineering), Amy Adcock (STEM Education and Professional Studies) - "Multiplayer Online Games for Information Quality Management," $59,438.
David Gauthier (Biological Sciences), Holly Gaff (Community and Environmental Health), Robert Latour (VIMS), Kimberly Reece (VIMS), Wolfgang Vogelbein (VIMS) - "Modeling Eco-Epidemiology of Chronic Disease in Wild Finfish," $74,250.
Gon Namkoong (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Keejoo Lee (Aerospace Engineering), Helmut Baumgart (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Hani Elsayed-Ali (Electrical and Computer Engineering) - "Ultrahigh-Efficiency Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Solar Cells using Nanorod-in-Nanotube Techniques," $91,000.
Michael McShane (Finance), Rani A. Kady (Engineering Management and Systems Engineering), Gnana K. Bharathy (Engineering Management and Systems Engineering) - "Multidisciplinary Investigation of Emerging and Complex Risks: Developing Integrated Risk Management Expertise," $22,000.
Yan Peng (Mathematics and Statistics), Li-Shi Luo (Mathematics and Statistics), Shizhi Qian (Aerospace Engineering), Wei Liao (Mathematics and Statistics) - "Numerical and Experimental Study of Complex Bio-Fluids in Microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip for Bio-Medical Applications," $70,599.
The funds made available to the teams must be expended by no later than June 30, 2010. Each team is expected to provide a written report, make an oral presentation and follow up with an aggressive plan to attract external grants.