ICAST 2026 Seed Grant Awardees

Date: 

June 2, 2026

The Institute for Community and Society Transformation has awarded $20,000 in funding to six project teams across various disciplines and departments. The funding covers a wide range of topics and prioritizes proposals that focus on the ICAST strategic areas of emphasis: Opportunity & Access, Technology & Society, and Native Nations Sovereignty and Cultures. Congratulations to the following teams: 

Leveraging Migration Ecology and Social Vulnerability to Characterize Bat Pathogen Spillover Risk

• Team: Daniel Becker, Jeremy Ross, & Anni Yang
• Project Description: This project combines bat migration ecology with measures of social vulnerability to assess and predict pathogen spillover risk, helping identify where and when zoonotic transmission is most likely to occur.

Trust in Elections in the Digital Age

• Team: Hannah Chapman & Daniela Donno
• Project Description: This project examines how perceptions of election integrity diverge from objective indicators of electoral quality in the digital age, and what drives public trust in elections. 

ViTal Mind: Benchmarking a Deployed dialectical AI Platform for Research-Grade Health Literacy and Evidence-Grounded Behavior Change Across Oklahoma

• Team: Samuel Cheng, Dan Li, Zhamak Khorgami, Shangqing Zhao, & Jie Cao
• Project Description: This project is designed to improve health literacy and support evidence-based change. It benchmarks the system's effectiveness across Oklahoma in delivering reliable health information and promoting healthier decisions. 

Develop Data- Driven Models of Cognitive Flexibility for Enhancing Learning and Adaptive Behavior

• Team: Farnaz Zamani Esfahlani, Michael Wenger, & Sina Khanmohammadi
• Project Description: This project develops data-driven models to enhance learning and adaptive behavior. Its objective is to establish reliable neural and behavioral markers of cognitive flexivility and link these markers to individual profiles of flexible and inflexible cognition. 

Turning Orphaned Wells into Tribal Assets: An Integrated Quantification and Carbon Registry Framework for the Caddo Nation

• Team: Tim Filley, Binbin Weng, & Catalin Teodoriu
• Project Description: This project partners with the Caddo Nation to reframe orphaned and abandoned wells in the Anadarko Basin as potential tribal assets through a caron registry framework. It builds on OU-Caddo Nation work using methane leak detection, environmental sampling, and Gaussian plume modeling to quantify emissions and impacts. 

SR4-Fit: Interpretable Rule-Based Learning for Trustworthy Decision-Making to Investigate National Trends in Child Neglect Recurrences in Child Protection Services

• Team: Dean Hougen, David McLeod, Constance Chapple, & Shyam Murali Krishnan
• Project Description: The central idea of this project is to use interpretable, data-enabled AI to uncover transparent patterns of child neglect recurrences and severity in large-scale welfare data.