The College of Engineering recently awarded six Multidisciplinary Research Seed Grants to faculty members, including one in partnership with the College of Health and Human Development and another with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. Credit: Kelby Hochreither/Penn State College of Engineering. All Rights Reserved.
College of Engineering awards six Multidisciplinary Research Seed Grants
May 20, 2022
By Mary Fetzer
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Engineering recently awarded six Multidisciplinary Research Seed Grants to faculty members, including one in partnership with the College of Health and Human Development and another with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.
Each one-year grant provides support for faculty members pursuing novel early-stage research with the potential for impact — in collaboration with others who possess complementary technical expertise, including industrial researchers. The award may fund undergraduate or graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, small equipment, software, user facility fees or materials and supplies.
George Lesieutre, associate dean for research and graduate programs for the College of Engineering, oversaw the process in which the six funded projects were selected from 36 submitted proposals.
“The College of Engineering’s Multidisciplinary Research Seed Grant program supports research that will increase the competitiveness of faculty in attracting high-impact multidisciplinary and center-level research funding from state and federal government, industry or foundations,” Lesieutre said, noting that the program consistently attracts strong proposals. “We were very impressed with the high quality of the proposals we received. The selected projects all focus on areas that could benefit society and are of significant interest to external funding agencies.”
Four projects, slated to begin this fall, were funded solely by the College of Engineering:
- “Smart Skull: Flexible electrical-acoustic neural interface for high-resolution recording and stimulation,” by Mehdi Kiani, associate professor of electrical engineering; Cunjiang Yu, associate professor of biomedical engineering; and Bruce Gluckman, professor of engineering science and mechanics.
- “Method of nanoimaging of biological samples: Convergence of near-field physics and biomedical applications,” by Slava Rotkin, professor of engineering science and mechanics, and William Hancock, professor of biomedical engineering.
- “Multiscale characterization of active materials: advancing understanding of structure-deformation mechanism-property relationships using ultrasound,” by Andrea Argüelles, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, and Reginald Hamilton, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics.
- “Manufacturing of multifunctional composite joints for on-orbit assembly of large-scale space structures,” by Xin Ning, assistant professor of aerospace engineering; Charles Bakis, distinguished professor of engineering science and mechanics; and Sven Bilén, professor of engineering design, electrical engineering and aerospace engineering.
One project was funded in partnership with the College of Health and Human Development and will start in January 2023:
- “How do human listeners cope with speech degradation due to poor room acoustics?” by Michelle Vigeant, associate professor of acoustics in the College of Engineering, and Navin Viswanathan, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders in the College of Health and Human Development.
One project was funded in partnership with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and will start this fall:
- “Next generation citrate-based biomaterials for bone regeneration,” by Jian Yang, professor of biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering, and April Armstrong, chair of the Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation in the College of Medicine.
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