BBI FY17 Seed Grant Winners Announced

The University of Maryland’s Brain and Behavior Initiative has announced its FY17 Seed Grant awardees.

Through our seed grant program, we successfully promote collaborations among faculty from research areas that are traditionally exclusive. A successful seed grant competition fosters new research projects undertaken by faculty who have never worked together before as interdisciplinary teams. These collaborations are truly interdisciplinary.

Our second round of seed grants was successful in attracting highly interdisciplinary teams. Proposals were reviewed by external brain and behavior experts who ranked them highly. Nine awards were made to 24 faculty members with home departments ranging from Dance, Biology, and Psychology to Engineering and Computer Science encompassing 5 colleges and the Division of Research.

Funded projects

Pamela Abshire (ECE/ISR), Karen Bradley (Dance), Adrianne Fang (Theatre), Brad Hatfield (Kinesiology), Jonathan Simon (ECE/ISR/BIO): Dance and EEG: Neural correlates of expressive movement

Andres De Los Reyes (PSYC), Sarah Racz (PSYC/FIRE), and Erica Glasper (PSYC): Biobehavioral links among social anxiety, risk-taking, and substance use

Robert Dooling (PSYC), Karen Carleton (BIOL), Farrah Madison (PSYC): Identifying candidate genes associated with sensorineural hearing loss in a novel vertebrate model

Heidi Fisher (BIOL) and Erica Glasper (PSYC): Characterizing biological changes associated with shift in reproductive strategy

Jonathan Fritz (ISR) and Bill Idsardi (LING): New representations in neuronal ensembles during initial language acquisition

Megan Fritz (ENTL), Carlos Machado (BIOL), and Quentin Gaudry (BIOL): Unraveling the neurogenetic architecture of human preference in mosquitoes

Luiz Pessoa (PSYC/MNC) and Joseph Jájá (ECE/UMIACS): Computing with trajectories: Novel methods for understanding spatiotemporal function MRI data

Robin Puett (SPH) and Stephanie Kuchinsky (MNC/CASL): Impact of meditation experience on the brain-body connection: Behavioral, physiological, and neural measures of stress-resilience

Joshua Singer (BIOL) and Patrick Kanold (BIOL): Control of cross-modal sensory plasticity by intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells

| Visit the BBI website at bbi.umd.edu |

Published May 12, 2017