Category: Research Grants

Each researcher was awarded a five-year, $1.8+ million award. MIRA awards provide investigators with greater stability and flexibility in funding, while enhancing their ability to take on ambitious scientific projects and approach problems more creatively.

Denise R. Simmons, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Civil & Coastal Engineering and associate dean for Workforce Development in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, is the leading principal investigator for the $1.28 million, four-year project “Critical Conversations: Systemic and Agentic Empowerment of Black Ph.D. Students and their Faculty Advisors in Engineering,” which is sponsored by the Racial Equity in STEM Education program, an initiative of the National Science Foundation’s Education and Human Resources (EHR) division that supports racial equity in STEM.

Erika Moore, Ph.D., holder of the Rhines Rising Star Larry Hench Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, has received the prestigious National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Dr. Moore and her team will use the five-year, $1.85 million award to address critical gaps in understanding the relationship between ancestry and cell responses in wound healing. In the long term, this research will lead to biomaterial models of health disparities for the improved identification of wound healing risks and outcomes.

Through a $4.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), two researchers in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering are working to advance the therapeutic intervention known as “neuromodulation,” fine-tuning electronic stimulation inside the body by creating next-generation electrodes that will deliver the equivalent of high fidelity for the central nervous system. 

A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by engineering faculty including James Fairbanks, Ph.D., an assistant professor in CISE, hopes to build software that will relate data from one scientific problem to another, with the goal of providing valuable applications for defense readiness.

Antarpreet Jutla, Ph.D., an environmental engineering sciences associate professor in the Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment, along with researchers and humanitarian advisors from other institutions, created a one-of-its-kind portal to predict and prevent cholera outbreaks. With a $1 million grant from NASA, UF will become one of the first institutions primed to understand the patterns of this disease’s emergence in several parts of the world with the use of prediction tools.

Nancy Ruzycki, Ph.D., instructional associate professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, is leading multiple K-12 engineering education initiatives to develop the teachers and the students to help fill prospective job openings in AI related fields.

Jennifer Nichols, Ph.D., assistant professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Department of Biomedical Engineering, and collaborators have been awarded a $2.2 million R01 grant from the NIH National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) for her project titled “Carpometacarpal Osteoarthritis: Understanding the Intersection of Muscle Mechanics, Joint Instability, and Pain.”

A recent grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention will allow Benjamin Lok, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, to train healthcare students and practitioners on how to express empathy when interacting with patients who have suicidal ideation. The project is titled “Virtual Interaction Training in Emotional Self-Awareness for Working with Suicidal Patients.”

Kristy Boyer, Ph.D., and Mehmet Celepkolu, Ph.D.Researchers from the University of Florida were recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore how to integrate AI learning into middle school science through natural language processing (NLP). Investigators will work with teachers and students at middle schools in Florida and Indiana.