Seed Grants

The BBI annual seed grant competition strives to generate novel tools and promote multidisciplinary approaches to understand complex behaviors produced by the nervous system. It has yielded an over 700% return through investments from government funding and private organizations, including the NIH BRAIN Initiative, NIA, NIAID, NIDCD, NIMH, NCCIH, NSF, AFOSR, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, AT&T, and the Lieber Institute for Brain Development. Explore the BBI's legacy of successful seed grant funding below.

2023 BBI Seed Grants

Inspired by cutting-edge technologies at UMD and BBI core facilities, the 2023 seed grant recipients take on such disorders as autism, anxiety, Alzheimer’s disease, hearing loss, caregiver-child communication, and familial dysautonomia—a rare but fatal neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorder. The investigators on the six interdisciplinary teams hail from 13 departments, centers and institutes across five UMD colleges, representing the diversity of backgrounds and methods that compose UMD’s collaborative neuroscience research environment.

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2022 BBI Seed Grants

The 2022 seed grant projects feature innovative approaches including a quantum materials-based blood test for Alzheimer’s disease, a machine learning approach to age-related hearing loss, a novel tool for identifying anxiety disorders among individuals with autism, the use of MEG for studying the timing of neural processes involved in sentence production and comprehension, and the investigation of actin cytoskeletal dynamics as a novel biomarker for AD progression.

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2020 BBI Seed Grants

The 2020 BBI Seed Grant projects tackle a highly diverse set of problems and research questions, including Alzheimer’s disease, disparities in hearing healthcare access, the influence of complex traumas on black men’s mental health, the detection and classification of human emotion based on gait, the neuroendocrine effect on brain function in the vertebrate brain, and the engineering of an organismal regulatory circuit.

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2019 BBI Seed Grants

Some of the challenges that this year’s seed projects treat are: aphasics’ struggles with word-finding, attitudes toward agricultural water reuse, difficulties in language comprehension among non-native speakers, the intransigence of bystanders during cases of bullying in middle and high school, the deleterious effects of building design on mental health, and the gap in knowledge about how the brain’s molecular and genetic structures affect human beings upon loss-of-function (e.g. in cases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s diseases).

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2018 BBI Seed Grants

The 2018 seed grants address such questions as how to engineer an in vitro platform to study the gut-brain axis, whether sound texture outweighs sequence for zebra finches, whether Brillouin microscopy can be adapted synaptic transmission, how to optimize the temporal resolution of calcium brain imaging, what are the psychobiological pathways supporting paranoia in psychosis, how the acquisition of relational words underlies childhood achievement in math, and how epigenetics influence decision-making for methamphetamine relapse.

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2017 BBI Seed Grants

The 2017 seed grants tackle such topics as the relationship between social anxiety and substance abuse, language acquisition and long-term auditory memory, the connections between meditation and gut health, the non-visual neural registration of ambient light, the genetic changes associated with fatherhood, the physical properties of mosquitos’ attraction to humans, the genetic variables associated with hereditary hearing loss, the development of a superior EEG for studying the neural correlates of dance, and how to improve analysis of the temporal properties of fMRI data.

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2016 BBI Seed Grants

The inaugural round of BBI seed grants address such matters as the effect of age on speech recognition for cochlear implant users, the development of a light-based tool for detecting schizophrenia via the retina, the new application of vesicle technology to study the neural workings of social behavior, the design of an ultrafast 3D imaging technique to examine behavior by imaging populations of neurons, and the development of a novel tool—the spin-torque nano-oscillator—to non-invasively report single action potentials from a neuron.

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