OU-Norman Vice President for Research, Partnerships Awards 17 Proposals Through New Funding Programs

SSHA seed grant projects and research teams awarded are:

• “A Gathering to Explore Relationality in Online Indigenous Language Revitalization Work,” led by Kari Chew (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Education) 
• “Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves,” led by Jill Hicks-Keeton (Religious Studies, College of Arts and Sciences) 
• “Growth, Citizenship, and the Politics of Water in Norman, Oklahoma,” led by Daniel Mains (Honors College) 
• “Intersections of Climate and Housing Justice: A Comparative Study of Adaptation Planning in Miami, Florida and Jakarta, Indonesia,” led by Emma Colven (International & Area Studies, College of International Studies) 
• “Making Sense of Medical Practice in a Pandemic: Convergent, Transdisciplinary, Transnational Research on Law, Politics, and Professionalism during COVID-19,” led by Fabio de Sa e Silva (International & Area Studies, College of International Studies) and Ryan Yarnall (Internal Medicine, OU-Tulsa) 
• “Promoting COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Through Tailored Health Messaging,” led by Shane Connelly (Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences), Sun Kyong Lee (Communication, College of Arts and Sciences) and Glenn Leshner (Gaylord College of  Journalism) 
• “Protecting and Learning from the Pueblo of Acoma’s Heritage in the ‘Lands Between’,” led by Samuel Duwe (Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences) 
• “River Channels: Institutional Barriers to Humanistic Excellence,” led by Kimberly Marshall and Anna Reser (Arts & Humanities Forum) 
• “School as a Battle Ground: Navigating Minoritized Teachers’ Identity Tension,” led by Ji Hong (Educational Psychology, College of Education) 
• “Spatial Storytelling with Emergent Technologies: Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity,” led by Laura Harjo (Native American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences), Angela Person and Shawn Schaefer (Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture) 
• “Special Rights: A History of the Anti-Gay Movement,” led by Jennifer Holland (History, College of Arts and Sciences) 
• “The IsisCB History of Pandemics Project,” led by Stephen Weldon (History of Science, College of Arts and Sciences) 
• “The National Weather Center/Oklahoma Weather Community Oral History Project,” led by Hunter Heyck (History of Science, College of Arts and Sciences) 

Four proposals, awarded through the Strategic Equipment Investment Program, will support the purchase of equipment that is expected to have significant impact in enhancing researchers’ capabilities and competitiveness at a national level, as well as provide new opportunities for advancing research teams’ ability to achieve new goals in terms of creativity, discovery, innovation, and competitiveness in securing external funding. 

“The awarded proposals will support the purchase of truly strategic research equipment that will advance OU’s research capabilities in areas of interest to external funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health, among others,” said Senior Associate Vice President for Research and Partnerships, John Antonio. “The equipment will also either be available in shared research spaces or will be available to researchers from multiple departments.”

Equipment to be funded through SEIP:

• A state-of-the-art instrument for automated, high-throughput purification of biomolecules – proposal led by Luca Fornelli (Biology, College of Arts and Sciences), J.P. Masly (Biology),  Mojgan Padash (Biology), Gavin Woodruff (Biology), Alexandra Bentz (Biology), Daniel Becker (Biology), Laura-Isobel McCall (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Nagib Ahsan (Chemistry and Biochemistry) and Zhibo Yang (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
• Beckman Coulter Optima Max-XP Tabletop Ultracentrifuge – proposal led by Stefan Wilhelm (Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering), Michael Detamore (Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering), Ann West (Oklahoma COBRE in Structural Biology), Lei Ding (Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering and Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology), John Klier (Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering), Wei Chen (Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering) and Ngoc Bui (Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering)
• Envision One cDLM 3D printing system – proposal led by Chung-Hao Lee (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering), Rong Gan (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering), Chenkai Dai (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering), Kuang-Hua Chang (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering), Zahed Siddique (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering), Wei Sun (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering), David Miller (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering), Yingtao Liu (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering), Keisha Walters (Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering), Andrew Fagg (Computer Science), Dean Hougen (Computer Science), Pedro Huebner (Industrial and Systems Engineering), Vassilios Sikavitsas (Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering), Qinggong Tang (Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering), Javier Jo (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Hong Liu (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Ulli Nollert (Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering) and Ed O'Rear (Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering)
• Lower Body Negative Pressure Chamber – proposal led by J. Mikhail Kellawan, (Health and Exercise Science, College of Arts and Sciences), Hugo Pereira (Health and Exercise Science) and Yair Pincu (Health and Exercise Science)

These awards complement another recent internal investment program initiated by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships in February 2021, the OU Big Idea Challenge. The Big Idea Challenge awarded five projects totaling $630,000. The projects are led by transdisciplinary teams to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological and translational innovations that integrate and that move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem, pursuing bold proposals that go well beyond traditional inter- and multidisciplinary efforts.