A significant number of research grants were awarded to CCAS scholars this year from top agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. These large awards open the door to new projects across the sciences, social sciences and the humanities—from innovations in mental healthcare to understanding the impacts of AI.
The following are recent major awards of $200,000 and above:
Leon Grayfer (Biology): $1,199,309 from NSF to study how amphibian microbiome-immune interactions affect greater antifungal defenses.
Roger Nober (Regulatory Studies Center): $1,178,000 from the John Templeton Foundation for research on increasing transparency and raising awareness of regulatory impacts to improve regulatory outcomes.
Christopher Cahill (Chemistry): $618,428 from the U.S. Department of Energy for research into synthesizing novel transuranic (TRU) materials, man-made radioactive elements that are heavier than uranium.
Nikolay Shiklomanov (Geography): $549,097 from NSF for research on the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring Network, an international scientific program that tracks how the freezing and thawing of high-latitude soils respond to climate change.
Cheri Marmarosh (Clinical Psychology): $538,335 from the John Templeton Foundation for training and treatment integration research in mental healthcare.
Lauren Pincus (Chemistry): $550,000 from NSF for research on determining the environmental controls of plastic photodegradation mechanisms.
Sylvain Guiriec (Astrophysics): $453,332 from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to explore the Galactic 511 keV Emission, a faint glow of gamma-ray light observed from the center of the Milky Way, in relation to the COSI (Compton Spectrometer and Imager) telescope.
Arnaud Martin (Biological Science): $320,000 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research-MURI program to study cellular mechanics in butterfly wing scales.
Stephen Mitroff (Psychology): $277,456 from the U.S. Army to study a scalable and adaptive multi-agent framework for human-AI teaming across hierarchies and time horizons; and $252,000 from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for a project titled “Everything Counts In Large Amounts: The Power Needed to Delineate the Many Factors that Impact Human Behavior.”
Jeffrey Ding (Political Science): $207,000 from Good Ventures Foundation for work on standardized U.S.-China AI cooperation.
Andrei Afanasev (Physics): $200,000 from NSF to support the study of 3D nucleon structure.
Leah Brooks (Public Policy and Public Administration): $199,923 from the Russel Sage Foundation for a project titled “The Perils and Promise of Living Together: Condominiums in the Urban Landscape.”