UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative awards announced
The Virtual Dairy Brain project will mimic actual farm management and develop real-time tools to help dairy farmers operate more effectively. Photo: Shutterstock.com
Funding for research projects that range from advancing wireless communications to developing a virtual dairy farm brain that will simulate actual farm management, are among the 21 proposals recently selected for UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative awards. The awards include eight infrastructure projects and 13 research projects that cross multiple divisions on campus.
A total of 104 faculty from across the university reviewed the 119 submitted projects. The 16-member UW2020 Council then ranked the proposals. Final selections were made by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education leadership.
PodcastRE (short for Podcast Research) is at the center of a project to store and preserve podcasts, and make them more accessible for research and investigation. Photo: Michael Trevis
The 21 funded projects include 137 faculty from 10 schools and colleges. Projects are funded for two years with the average award totaling $372,923.
The recent awards represent the third round of UW2020 funded projects since the initiative was launched last year. This year’s awards bring the total UW2020 projects funded to date to 49.
The goal of UW2020 is to stimulate and support cutting edge, highly innovative and groundbreaking research at UW–Madison and the acquisition of shared instruments or equipment that will open new avenues for innovative and significant research.
The project “CREATE” seeks to determine the range of psychosocial and environmental stressors facing children and their associations with physiological stress response and academic readiness. Photo: Bryce Richter
“These awards position our faculty to be even more successful as they apply for extramural funding in an increasingly competitive environment,” says Marsha Mailick, UW–Madison vice chancellor for research and graduate education. “Innovative ideas like those proposed for UW2020 are critical to maintaining UW–Madison’s world-class research standing, and we are extremely grateful for WARF’s continuing support for this initiative.”
The Graduate School is supplying direct support for research assistants. Additional contributions are provided by UW-Extension and the Morgridge Institute for Research.
The UW2020 research and infrastructure projects are:
Research
- A CRISPR/Cas9 Based Therapeutic Strategy for Alzheimer’s Disease
- A Virtual Dairy Farm Brain: The Next Big Leap in Dairy Farm Management Applying Artificial Intelligence
- An Adaptive Computational Pipeline to Accelerate Drug Discovery
- Anti-Virulence Approaches to Prevent Bacterial Infection and Combat Evolved Resistance in Next-Generation Wound Dressings
- “Cardioimmunotherapy” – A Paradigm Shifting Concept: Engineering Cardio-Reparative Macrophages by Cardiac Specific Exosomes
- CREATE: Cumulative Risks, Early Development, and Emerging Academic Trajectories
- Development of a High-Flux Fusion Neutron Source for Academic and Industrial Applications
- Engineering Leukocytes Generated from Human iPS Cells to Treat Human Disease
- Laying the Foundation for a New NSF-Funded Mathematics Institute
- Radio Neutrino Detection Using Scalable Technologies to Lower Energy Thresholds
- Testing the Action Basis of Language Structure and Language Production
- The Human Microbiome in Health and Disease
- Towards a City-Scale Living Laboratory for Advanced Wireless Research
Infrastructure
- A Plant Phenotyping Core at the Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center to Enable Discovery and Technology Transfer
- Acquisition of State-of-the-Art Solid-State NMR Instrumentation Enabling Characterization of Nanoparticles, Catalysts, Other Novel Materials, and Biochemical Systems
- Bringing the Cryo-electon Microscopy Revolution to UW–Madison
- Development of the Wisconsin Integrated Biodiversity, Human, and Environmental Specimen Portal: A Gateway to More than 11 Million UW Natural History Museum Specimens
- Metal Powder Bed 3-D Printing
- Saving New Sounds: Preserving Podcasts and Making Audio Culture Analyzable
- SIMFab: Shared Instrumentation for Micro-bio Fabrication
- The Digital Maximum (DM) Project