Inside Research & Funding Opportunities
03/02/2022, 11:00:02 AM
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Inside Research
News, Events and Resources for the UH Research Community
 
Latest News Upcoming Events Announcements Recent Grant Awards Featured Funding Ops
Research Reaching Houston

The NAE Welcomes UH Research Professor of Geophysics Leon Thomsen

Each year, National Academy of Engineering members (numbering around 2,000) recognize outstanding technical and practical contributions by high-achieving industrial, academic and governmental engineers and applied scientists, electing them as new members of the academy.

The academy chose Leon Thomsen, research professor of geophysics, for his extraordinary “contributions to seismic anisotropy concepts that produced major advances in subsurface analysis.” The reference is to his discovery of new methods to visualize properties of subsurface rock formations, which forever changed the ways front-line geophysicists find oil and natural gas.

The NAE honored Thomsen for his revolutionary contributions to geophysics and his storied achievements over a long career in industry and academia, including his current appointment in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. 

Read More

Campus News

AI Retail Innovation Lab

 

UH Researchers Develop 3D Imaging Technique to Understand How Dendrites Form in Batteries

Xiaonan Shan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his team have developed a “novel in-situ” 3D microscopy to image and study the localized electrochemical environments and understand where dendrites start forming in batteries. Dendrites are spiky structures that accumulate on the batteries’ anodes. These structures reduce the life of the batteries.

Using the 3D microscope, small cameras and other computer imaging technology, Shan and his team were able to geometrically map out how a battery initially develops dendrites.The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

 

Selling Texans on Electric Vehicles May Be Uphill Climb

 

Ever more electric vehicles can be spotted these days on the urban roads of Texas. But switching the whole state from gas tanks to batteries is looking like a tough sell.

That is what 2,067 respondents to the Texas Trends Survey, conducted by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs and the Texas Southern University Jordan-Leland School of Public Affairs, had to say about going electric – now and any time in the future. 

AI Retail Innovation Lab

New PhRMA Foundation Fellowship for Ph.D. Candidate Aids Research into Reducing Chemotherapy's Gut Toxicity 

Witnessing the devastating physical and psychological toll of cancer and chemotherapy not only on patients themselves, but also the emotional pain the disease and treatment caused to their family and friends guided UH College of Pharmacy Ph.D. candidate Gabriel Tao to seek better solutions to current oncology therapeutics.

Tao's investigations into how treatments for certain types of cancer can be modified to minimize the pain and discomfort experienced by patients recently received a boost thanks to a $25,000 Predoctoral Fellowship in Drug Discovery from the PhRMA Foundation.

Upcoming Events

HPE DSI: Supervised Clustering—Algorithms and Applications
Thursday, March 3
11 a.m.-Noon
Register

RESCHEDULED!
New Faculty Lunch & Learn: Gifts, Grants, Contracts, IDC & Technical Reports

Thursday, March 10
Noon - 1 p.m.
Register

Ongoing RCR for Research Teams
Wednesday, March 23
11 a.m.-Noon
Register

Discovering Your Research Impact
Tuesday, March 29
11 a.m.-Noon
Register

Machine and Deep Learning for Medical Imaging with MATLAB
Tuesday, March 29
2 p.m.-3 p.m.
Register

Third Annual Port of the Future Conference
Presented by the UH College of Technology 
April 5-7
Register

Getting Funding from Foundations + TRIP Match
Wednesday, April 13
Register

Announcements

Women in Engineering

Join the Women's Entrepreneurship Symposium Today!

Are you a current or aspiring inventor or entrepreneur? Would you like to learn from successful innovators and subject matter experts about keys to success and how to use your creativity to reach your full potential? If so, be sure to attend the United States Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) 2022 Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium (WES) Part one, Educate and innovate, today at 1 p.m. CST. Register and learn more about this free online event.

 

Call for Abstracts: Geriatric Medication Safety Symposium

Organizers of the inaugural Geriatric Medication Safety Symposium April 7-8 in the Texas Medical Center have issued a call for abstracts for research projects focused on medication safety and use, especially within the geriatric patient population.

Co-hosted by faculty researchers at UH College of Pharmacy and UTHealth McGovern Medical School, the symposium is supported by a multiyear grant from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health.

Learn More

 

2022 John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award Program

The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC) announced the RFA for the 2022 John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award Program on Tuesday, March 1. Launched in 2009 with generous support from the John S. Dunn Foundation, this seed grant program continues to build the collaborative environment of the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC) and fund projects with high potential for impacting human health.

The purpose of this program is to foster new, exemplary inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional engagement in the quantitative biomedical sciences by providing research seed grants. Funds will be awarded to new collaborative teams in which the PI and co-PI are from different GCC member institutions: Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, University of Houston, UT Health Science Center at Houston, UT Medical Branch at Galveston, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Institute of Biosciences and Technology of Texas A&M.

Each GCC member institution will select three teams submitting pre-proposals (submitted internally to their own institution) to move to the full proposal stage. After pre-proposal selection by the member institutions, GCC staff will manage the full proposal process and a total of three will be selected to receive a Dunn Collaborative Research Award of up to $100,000 per team to support research/preliminary work for two years.

Pre-proposals are due to the University of Houston, Division of Research limited submission site by 11:59 p.m. (CST) on Friday, April 1.

The GCC will host a Virtual Informational Session on March 10 at 9 a.m. (CST) and March 24 at 9 a.m. (CST) on Zoom.

View past announcements on the Division of Research website.

Featured Funding Opportunities

Health Science, Engineering & Technology Social Sciences, Art & Humanities Education
Image Health

 

Funding Agency: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Title: Microbial-based Cancer Imaging and Therapy - Bugs as Drugs (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Application Deadline: June 5, 2022 (standard due dates; program ends in 2025)


The purpose of this FOA is to encourage grant applications to study novel microbial-based cancer therapy (including therapies for oral cancer), imaging detection, and diagnosis strategies to overcome the limitations of inadequate conventional cancer imaging and therapies. Solutions may utilize bacteria, archaebacteria, bacteriophages, and other microorganisms and their products (but not oncolytic viruses).

 

Funding Agency: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Title:  Team-Based Design in Biomedical Engineering Education (R25 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Application Deadline: May 30, 2022; May30, 2023; May 30,2024


The NIH Research Education Program (R25) supports research education activities in the mission areas of the NIH.  The over-arching goal of this NIBIB R25 program is to support educational activities that complement and/or enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nations biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs. To accomplish the stated over-arching goal, this FOA will support creative educational activities with a primary focus on Courses for Skills Development. This FOA seeks to support programs that include innovative approaches to enhance biomedical engineering design education to ensure a future workforce that can meet the nations needs in biomedical research and healthcare technologies. 

 

Funding Agency: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Title:  BRAIN Initiative Connectivity across Scales (BRAIN CONNECTS): Specialized Projects for Scalable Technologies (U01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Application Deadline: July 13, 2022; June 13, 2023; June 13, 2024


This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) supports Specialized Projects to develop current or emerging technologies to generate comprehensive atlases of brain connectivity, with an emphasis on human, non-human primate (NHP), and mouse.  Projects validating approaches using other species are also permitted if well justified.  Applications may address any aspects of the data collection, analysis, and dissemination pipelines, to enable faster and more cost-effective generation and interpretation of brain-wide wiring diagrams.  Projects will offer distinct capabilities and competencies aimed at developing and optimizing current technologies or entirely new and potentially risky approaches.

 

Funding Agency: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Title:  Development of Biomarkers or Biomarker Signatures for Neurological and Neuromuscular Disorders (R61/R33 Clinical Trial Optional)

Application Deadline: June 22, 2022 (standard due dates; program ends in 2025)


The overarching purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to promote the discovery and/or early evaluation of strong candidate biomarkers and biomarker signatures that can be used as tools to facilitate the clinical development of neurotherapeutics and their use in clinical practice.  Specifically, the focus of this FOA is on the identification and initial biological, analytical and clinical evaluation of biomarkers and biomarker signatures for neurological and neuromuscular disorders. Although research supported by this FOA can include animal studies, it must also include preliminary human evaluation using carefully standardized human samples or datasets. The goal of this initiative is to deliver candidate biomarkers or biomarker signatures that are ready for definitive analytical and clinical validation studies.

 

Funding Agency: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Title:  Partnerships for Rapid Diagnostics and Phenotypic Antibacterial Susceptibility Testing for Bacteremia or Hospital Acquired Pneumonia (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Application Deadline: June 01, 2022


The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to solicit research applications for projects focused on development and/or production of medical diagnostics that permit rapid differential species identification, and corresponding phenotypic antibacterial susceptibility profiles for bacteremia or hospital acquired pneumonia. The primary goal of such diagnostics is to facilitate antibacterial stewardship, thereby reducing selective pressure and improving patient outcomes.

 

Funding Agency: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Title:  Screening for Cognitive Impairment: Decision-Making (U24 Clinical Trial Optional)

Application Deadline: July 11, 2022


This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites research to develop, validate, and disseminate measurement tools that could be used to screen for deficits related to decision-making, planning, and other important higher order functional outcomes in older adults. In particular, we are interested in instruments that can track changes in decision-making capacity that could be useful in the context of future screening for cognitive impairment and the development of interventions targeting functional outcomes in persons living with cognitive impairment and/or quality of life outcomes in their care partners/caregivers. The goal of the FOA is to support a research network whose goals would be to review and assess the dimensions of higher cognitive abilities and functional capacities already believed to support higher order planning and decision-making, to develop valid and reliable measures of those abilities, and to provide support for pilot efforts during the instrument development and validation in a racially, ethnically, geographically, and diagnostically diverse set of participants as well as a set of enduring resources including the measurement instruments, documentation, and normative data that will enable other, future projects to incorporate the new measurements into studies.

Image Science, Engineering, & Technology

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

Title:  Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI)

Application Deadline: May 5, 2022


Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research aimed at strengthening America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. Achieving these objectives requires the integration of expertise from across all science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how fundamental knowledge about human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. Successful projects will represent a convergence of expertise in one or more SBE sciences deeply integrated with other disciplines to support substantial and potentially pathbreaking, fundamental research applied to strengthening a specific and focal infrastructure.


Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

Title:  Research Security Training for the United States (U.S.) Research Community

Application Deadline: May 23, 2022


The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Defense (DOD), seek proposals for the development of on-line training modules designed to promote the understanding of research security for researchers and other key personnel whose work is supported by federally funded research awards at awardee organizations.

 

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

Title:  Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions

Application Deadline: May 20, 2022


The Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) program is a broad-based research program with the goal of understanding the behavior of atmospheric regions from the middle atmosphere upward through the thermosphere and ionosphere into the exosphere in terms of coupling, energetics, chemistry, and dynamics on regional and global scales. These processes are related to the sources of perturbations that propagate upward from the lower atmosphere as well as to solar radiation and particle inputs from above. The activities within this program include observations from ground-based and space-based platforms, theory, and modeling.

 

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

Title:  Dear Colleague Letter: Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) and Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Supplemental Funding in Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Application Deadline: May 31, 2022


The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) invites grantees with active CISE awards to submit requests for Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Supplements, following the guidelines in the REU Sites and Supplements solicitation (NSF 19-582). CISE also invites grantees with active CISE awards to submit requests for Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Supplements, following the guidelines in the RET in Engineering and Computer Science: Supplements and Sites solicitation (NSF 21-606). Requests will be considered as they are received. CISE strongly encourages the submission of requests before May 31, 2022; the potential for funding requests after this date may be limited.

 

Funding Agency: Department of Defense--Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Title:  Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC)

Application Deadline: March 23, 2022


The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative approaches to address challenges related to quantum computing. The program Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) will explore innovative approaches to constructing a utility-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer. Proposed research should investigate approaches that enable revolutionary advances in design, engineering, testing, and evaluation of such systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.

 

Funding Agency: Department of Energy

Title:  Research Development and Partnership Pilot (RDPP)

Application Deadline: April 20, 2022


The DOE Office of Science (SC) program in Biological and Environmental Research (BER) hereby announces its interest in receiving applications for a Research Development and Partnership Pilot (RDPP) within BER’s Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD). BER has a goal to broaden and diversify institutional representation in the EESSD portfolio with institutions that have limited familiarity and/or engagement with EESSD supported efforts.

Social Science, Arts and Humanities

 

Funding Agency: United States Department of State (DOS)--Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) 

Title:  Creative Arts Exchange

Application Deadline: May 16, 2022 (Limited Submission; one proposal per institution)


Creative Arts Exchange (CAE) initiatives are arts-based, international people-to-people exchanges that support and further U.S. Department of State foreign policy objectives and support the Interim National Security Strategy goals of strengthening democratic values around the globe by demonstrating the power of creative free expression; and growing inclusive economic opportunities and prosperity for communities globally. CAE initiatives create partnerships through artistic collaboration and professional development. Programs are implemented in close coordination with U.S. embassies and consulates abroad. Eligible themes and/or artistic genres for CAE initiatives vary and are determined based on Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) strategic priorities. It is the Bureau’s intent to award two cooperative agreements in FY 2022, pending the availability of funds, for a total estimated amount of $2,780,000 under the following themes: Theme 1: Performing Arts (Center Stage), and Theme 2: Hip-Hop Collaboration (Next Level). Please see NOFO sections A.) Program Description and B.) Federal Award Information, for additional details.

Education

 

Funding Agency: Department of Education (ED)
Title: Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE): Project to Support America’s Families and Educators (Project SAFE) Grant Program Assistance Listing Number (ALN) 84.184N
Application Deadline:
Rolling

 

The Project SAFE grant program provides grants to eligible LEAs to improve student safety and well-being by advancing strategies consistent with CDC guidance to reduce transmission of COVID-19 in schools. (must partner with an LEA).

Lindsay Lewis | University of Houston Division of Research
lrlewis@uh.edu | uh.edu/research | 713-743-0951

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