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.
Detecting and classifying human emotion is one of the most challenging problems at the confluence of psychology, affective computing, kinesiology, and data science. This research examines the role of age and gender on gait-based emotion recognition using deep learning.
Learn moreFor black men, experiences of trauma underlie the vast majority of mental health disparities. In order to study this trauma, this study gathers an understanding of how black men give meaning trauma, assesses the ongoing stress and risk in toxic environments, and catalogs the creation of strategies for healthy resilience to toxic environments.
In order to understand the non-genomic, rapid effects of steroid hormones for motivation in birdsong, this project develops time-release capsules to take behavioral measurements at the time of testostorone release in normally-behaving canaries.
This project looks to design more effective exercise training for those at risk of Alzheimer’s disease by identifying a biomarker for early detection: brain glucose uptake. This project hypothesizes that brain glucose uptake from female subjects with APOE4 alleles will be lowest and that exercise will begin to reverse this effect.
Hearing loss has been correlated with many mental health difficulties, including depression, anxiety, loneliness, and cognitive decline. This project uses a value-sensitive design framework to disclose the values enacted in both over-the-counter and traditional service models with an eye toward improving the development, administration, and use of hearing technologies.
This project proposes to engineer a synthetic behavior to understand plausible solutions to the age-old "nature v. nuture" conundrum and develop a paradigm for rigorous experimental analysis—namely, to create the organismal regulatory circuits such that the adaptation to an odor is lost for many generations in the roundworm.