Division Of Research Awards 13 Grants To Texas A&M Faculty

Thirteen faculty members at Texas A&M University received research grants totaling $250,595 from the Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities (PESCA), the Division of Research at Texas A&M announced today.

The Division of Research funds the PESCA Grant Program to support significant research and scholarly projects that have the potential to lead to the awarding of external funding by agencies and endowments such as major federal research funding agencies, national endowments, institutes, foundations and councils.

A variety of activities are eligible for funding including travel for research and to collections and libraries, access to data resources, graduate student support, and seed funding to support application for federal and other national-level grants.

The 2019 grants, which range in amounts from $9,898 to $25,000, will provide seed funding for research projects in disciplines as diverse as computer science, public health, architecture, pharmaceutical science, geography, veterinary medicine, sociology, law, engineering, human medicine, and agriculture.

“Congratulations to our faculty members who received PESCA funding this year,” Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said. “Many of their projects represent multidisciplinary collaborations that tackle significant challenges for global society and demonstrate potential to attract additional funding from sources outside Texas A&M. We look forward to their results.”

The principal investigators for each project, their proposal titles, the PESCA grant amounts and their co-principal investigators are:

• George Allen, assistant professor, Department of Geography, College of Geosciences, “Developing a Method for the Rapid Detection of Freshwater Plastic Pollution,” $25,000, with co-principal investigators Anthony Filippi, associate professor, and Inci Güneralp, associate professor, both in the Department of Geography, College of Geosciences.
• Ernesto Amaral, assistant professor, Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, “Factors Associated with Internal and International Migration at the Local Level in the United States, ” $24,849, with co-principal investigators Valen Johnson, University Distinguished Professor and head, and Edward R. Jones, executive professor, both in the Department of Statistics, College of Science.
• Theodora Chaspari, assistant professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, “Preserving Speaker Identity in Cyber-Interactions,” $10,000.
• Lei-Shih Chen, associate professor, Department of Health and Kinesiology, College of Education and Human Development, “Examining Contextual Risk Factors of Smoking during Pregnancy and Postpartum Smoking Relapse among Rural, Low-Income Maternal Women,” $25,000, with co-principal investigators Ping Ma, assistant professor, Department of Health Promotion and Community Health Sciences, and Maria Perez-Patron, research assistant professor and director, Program on Reproductive and Child Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, both in the School of Public Health.
• Brent Fortenberry, assistant professor, Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, “Database of Enslaved Vernacular Architecture,” $9,898.20.
• Holly Foster, professor, Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, “Biosocial Stress Processes across the Early to Mid Life Course:  Pathways from Early Pubertal Timing to Women’s Later Health Inequalities,” $10,000.
• Inci Güneralp, associate professor, Department of Geography, College of Geosciences, “Tracing the Signature of Human-Induced Deforestation on Lowland Tropical River Landscapes Using Simulation Modeling and Deep Learning,” $24,897, with co-principal investigators Anthony Filippi, associate professor, Department of Geography, College of Geosciences; Georgianne Moore, associate professor, Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and Zhangyang “Atlas” Wang, assistant professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering.
• Zong Liu, assistant professor, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, “Manure Coated Mineral Fertilizer for Controlled Nutrient Release, ” $24,969, with co-principal investigators Julie A. Howe, associate professor, Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, and Yu “Yvette” Zhang, associate professor, Department of Agricultural Economics, both in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
• Ping Ma, assistant professor, Department of Health Promotion and Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health, “Using a Mixed-Methods Approach to Examine Contextual Factors About Unintentional Injury Risk Among Children with Special Healthcare Needs,” $25,000, with co-principal investigators Eva Shipp, research scientist and manager, Crash Analytics Program, Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and Dalun Zhang, professor, Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education and Human Development.
• Jayshree Mishra, research assistant professor, Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy, “Development of a Novel Bio-Marker for the Early Detection of Colorectal Cancer,” $18,000, with co-principal investigator Narendra Kumar, associate professor, Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy.
• Nicola Ritter, instructional assistant professor, Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, “Where Success Begins: Leveraging Learning Analytics to Predict Student Program Success During the Pre-Admissions Process,” $25,000, with co-principal investigators Karen Cornell, associate dean for professional programs, Office of the Dean, and Molly Gonzales, instructional assistant professor, Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.
• Andreea Trache, associate professor, Department of Medical Physiology, College of Medicine, with a joint appointment to the Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, “Improving Vascular Smooth Muscle Function in Elderly with E2 – Exercise and Epigenetics,” $18,000, with co-principal investigators Christopher Woodman, associate professor, Department of Health and Kinesiology, College of Education and Human Development.
• Saurabh Vishnubhakat, associate professor, School of Law, “The Patent Landscape of Bioinformatics,” $10,000.

About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represented annual expenditures of more than $905.4 million in fiscal year 2017, ranking Texas A&M in the top 20 of the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development survey (2017). Texas A&M’s research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting, in many cases, in economic benefits to the state, nation and world. To learn more, visit http://research.tamu.edu.