Campus Life

PVAMU And Texas A&M Announce Faculty Winners Of $400K Joint PRISE Research Grants For 2022

Collaborative research areas include agriculture, architecture, science, education, engineering and psychology.
By Texas A&M University Research Communications and Public Relations April 5, 2022

Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) and Texas A&M University are continuing their mission of increasing research collaborations between the two institutions. PVAMU and Texas A&M are awarding $400,000 in grants to support 10 PVAMU-Texas A&M teams of faculty investigators to support research projects under the 2022 Panther Research and Innovation for Scholarly Excellence (PRISE) grant program.

The universities initiated the PRISE grant program in October 2020 to boost the submission of multidisciplinary, collaborative proposals from the two institutions in response to federal requests for proposals to address complex problems. Today, PVAMU and Texas A&M are announcing the winners of the 2022 PRISE grants.

“The PRISE initiative is an example of how inter-institutional scholarly research projects build relationships to discover ongoing professional and research opportunities,” said Magesh Rajan, PVAMU vice president for Research & Innovation. “There is an emergent acknowledgment of the essential value of inter-institutional collaboration, which is made increasingly more attainable by the evolution of current technologies­.”

The 2022 PRISE program application procedure was modified to double the grant amount for each awardee. Thus, the application process required one PVAMU faculty member to partner with one A&M faculty member on a proposal. The program received an overwhelming number of 37 proposals, many of which were outstanding. Each submission was reviewed by a three-member panel of PVAMU and Texas A&M faculty. Ten proposals were selected for funding.

Each selected proposal is funded at a level of $40,000 for one year. It is expected that the investigator-teams will make substantial progress and submit strong proposals to external funding agencies in the next year to continue their work.

“Collaborations like these are the drivers of outstanding research,” said Jack G. Baldauf, Texas A&M interim vice president for research. “The PRISE program is designed to encourage our combined faculties to explore opportunities to address some of society’s greatest challenges. We look forward to the results of these partnerships.”

The following investigator-teams and projects were selected for the Panther-RISE Grant Awards:

Peter Ampim, PVAMU College of Agriculture & Human Sciences, and Sakiko Okumoto, Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Smart agriculture: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions through plant root secretion

Javad Barouei, PVAMU College of Agriculture & Human Sciences, and Anil Somenahally, Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Mitigation of food safety risks from agriculture fields through soil microbiome management

Suxia Cui, PVAMU College of Engineering, and Dilma Da Silva, Texas A&M College of Engineering. Serverless computing risks analysis and mitigation

Vahid Faghihi, PVAMU School of Architecture, and Ivan Damnjanovic, Texas A&M College of Engineering. Investigating the effectiveness of prediction markets in teaching project risks

Thiagarajan Ramakrishnan, PVAMU College of Business, and Lei Zou, Texas A&M College of Geosciences. Leveraging geospatial big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve disaster resilience in vulnerable communities

Kristan Russell, PVAMU College of Juvenile Justice, and Xinyue Ye, Texas A&M College of Architecture. Integrating crime pattern theory and spatial analytic techniques to examine youth crime

Temilola Salami, PVAMU College of Arts & Sciences, and Noni Gaylord-Harden, Texas A&M College of Liberal Arts. Developing an adaptive toolkit for the prevention of IPV and IPV-Related mental health sequelae among Black college students

Beverly Sande, PVAMU College of Education, and Gwendolyn Webb, Texas A&M College of Education and Human Development. Assessing teachers’ and leaders’ perceptions and applications of culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy

Shahin Shafiee, PVAMU College of Engineering, and Debjyoti Banerjee, Texas A&M College of Engineering. Leveraging machine learning for fundamental investigation of anomalous transport phenomena of nanofluids under the effect of external fields for energy storage applications

Beverly A. Spears, PVAMU College of Arts & Sciences, and Muna Bhattarai, Texas A&M College of Nursing. Examining posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, resilience and posttraumatic growth in college students with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic

Both PVAMU and Texas A&M are members of The Texas A&M University System.

About Research at Prairie View A&M University: PVAMU is committed to elevating its research and innovation enterprise to become an emerging research institution. By nurturing a vibrant research and innovation ecosystem at PVAMU and building collaborations and partnerships with external partners, PVAMU will elevate, transform and impact our global communities and have a broader impact on the greater society. Our research presence, as a recently designated Carnegie R2 institution, confirms PVAMU is moving toward the upper quartile in research prominence among HBCUs. pvamu.edu/research

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 in science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M generated annual expenditures of more than $1.148 billion in fiscal year 2021. Texas A&M ranked 14th in the most recent National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development Survey based on expenditures of more than $1.131 billion in fiscal year 2020. 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 Research@Texas A&M.

Media contacts:

Related Stories

Recent Stories