Investigating the use of advanced hydrogels in post-stroke rehabilitation.
Filming the first documentary about women conductors.
Determining whether metadata from mobile phones can be used to monitor demographic trends—such as births and deaths—in low- and middle-income countries.
These are among 26 multidisciplinary endeavors that have been selected to receive support this year from Johns Hopkins University’s Discovery Awards program. Each project team is made up of members from at least two JHU schools or affiliates who aim to solve a complex problem and expand the horizons of knowledge.
Altogether, the winning project teams—chosen from 188 proposals—include 86 individuals representing nine schools and affiliates.
“This year’s proposals are a testament to the remarkable work of Johns Hopkins researchers across so many fields,” said Ronald J. Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University. “Faced with a challenging landscape for federal funding, it is critical we support these cross-divisional teams and the impact of their creativity and discovery on our world.”
The Discovery Awards program was announced in early 2015, as was the Catalyst Awards program for early-career researchers. Together the two programs represent a $15 million university commitment to faculty-led research by university leadership along with the deans and directors of JHU’s divisions.
Cross-divisional teams involving faculty in the Whiting School of Engineering include:
Anomaly Detection for Zero Shot Learning with Applications to Rare Myopathic Disease Diagnostics
- Mauro Maggioni (Arts & Sciences/Engineering), Philippe Burlina (Medicine), I-Jeng Wang (Applied Physics Lab) & Jemima Albayda (Medicine)
Computational Design of High-Resolution Protein Crystals to Reveal BiomolecularMechanisms
- Jeffrey Gray (Engineering), Bertrand Garcia-Moreno (Arts & Sciences) & James Berger (Medicine)
Decoding the Effect of Incident Acoustic Waves on the Flight of Mosquitoes
- Rajat Mittal (Engineering), Anthony Cammarato (Medicine), George Dimopoulos (Public Health) & Christopher Potter (Medicine)
Engineering plasticity after stroke to promote recovery using peptide π-electron hydrogels
- Ryan Felling (Medicine), Steven Zeiler (Medicine), Hai-Quan Mao (Engineering) & J.D. Tovar (Arts & Sciences)
Local Immunotherapy with Tumor-Penetrating Hydrogels
- Honggang Cui (Engineering) & Fengyi Wan (Public Health)
Mapping Chromosomal Organization by single-cell in-situ sequencing
- Jie Xiao (Medicine), Xin Chen (Arts & Sciences) & Taekjip Ha (Arts & Sciences/Engineering/Medicine)
Metagenomic Sequencing for Diagnosis of Infections
- Steven Salzberg (Medicine/Public Health/Engineering), Carlos Pardo (Medicine), Charles Eberhart (Medicine), Cynthia Sears (Medicine), Patricia Simner (Medicine) & Karen Carroll (Medicine)
Novel high-throughput screening system for cardiac tissue
- Narutoshi Helleringer (Public Health) & Yun Chen (Engineering)
Optoacoustic based Intrapartum Fetal Brain Monitoring to Prevent Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy
- Ernest Graham (Medicine), Ray Koehler (Medicine) & Emad Boctor (Medicine/Engineering)
Real-Time Laser-Tissue Interaction Assessment and Control Using Speckle Variance Optical Coherence Tomography
- Mary Sheu (Medicine), Jin Kang (Engineering), & Sewon Kang (Medicine)
Resolving transcriptome architecture using single molecule direct RNA sequencing
- Winston Timp (Engineering), James Taylor (Arts & Sciences/Engineering) & John Kim (Arts & Sciences)
Targeting the Mechanobiome of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma
- Douglas Robinson (Medicine), Robert Anders (Medicine), Caren Freel Meyers (Medicine), Pablo Iglesias (Engineering), Elizabeth Jaffee (Medicine) & Lei Zheng (Medicine)