Thirteen interdisciplinary Ohio State research teams have been awarded up to $50,000 each in Accelerator grants through the President’s Research Excellence (PRE) program in the fall cycle.
PRE Accelerator grants are reserved for small teams formed to pursue curiosity-driven, novel, high-risk and high-reward research. Ohio State has invested more than $5 million to teams of Ohio State investigators through the PRE program since its inception in 2021.
Assurance of Safety, Quality and Sustainability of Foods Produced on Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Habitats
Lead PI: Sudhir Sastry (College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences)
Co-investigators: Christopher Simons and Ahmed Yousef (College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences)
Project description: Military rations must meet exacting sterility requirements but need quality improvement. NASA is investigating food production but needs to address pathogen control. We address both challenges, drawing on our discovery that bacterial spore inactivation is accelerated by electric fields.
Engineered Extracellular Vesicles to Mitigate Microvascular Damage in Diabetic Kidney Disease
Lead PI: Nicholas Ferrell (College of Medicine)
Co-investigator: Natalia Higuita Castro (College of Engineering)
Project description: This team has developed a novel therapeutic platform to deliver anti-inflammatory engineered extracellular vesicles (eEVs) to preserve kidney function in diabetes. They aim to establish this technology to treat diabetic kidney disease then expand this platform to target other organs affected by diabetes.
Citicoline to treat acute myocardial infarction
Lead PI: Ian Davis (College of Veterinary Medicine)
Co-investigators: Kara Corps (Collegeof Veterinary Medicine); Brandon Biesiadecki (College of Medicine);
Project description: High risk/high reward studies are proposed to test efficacy of citicoline as a potential new drug to help alleviate the short- and long-term consequences of acute myocardial infarction using an experimental murine model developed by Dr. Biesiadecki.
Novel role for iron homeostasis in air pollution driven susceptibility to pulmonary infections
Lead PI: Kymberly Gowdy (College of Medicine)
Co-investigators: Amanda Bird (College of Education and Human Ecology)
Project description: Air pollution exacerbates cardiopulmonary diseases including pulmonary infections. The team’s data indicate that iron is increased in the lung following air pollution exposure. This proposal will evaluate if this increase in iron drives increased inflammation during pulmonary infections.
Revolutionizing Observations of Severe Thunderstorms Using Cosmic Ray Muography
Lead PI: Jana Houser (College of Arts and Sciences)
Co-investigators: William Luszczak (College of Arts and Sciences)
Project description: This proposal introduces a novel proof-of-concept technique that uses a muon detector capable of discerning variations in atmospheric density, to acquire remote and multi-dimensional data within severe thunderstorms capable of producing tornadoes. The PIs will deploy the detector in the field.
Heterogeneous Integration of RF-Sputtered BaTiO3 Thin Films on silicon for Ultrahigh-Speed Electro-Optic Modulators
Lead PI: Shamsul Arafin (College of Engineering)
Co-investigators: Fengyuan Yang (College of Arts and Sciences)
Project description: In this 12-month pilot-scale and defense-related research, the team proposes to design, material synthesis, characterization and fabricate a discrete barium titanate-based optical modulators using a basic waveguide architecture.
WEEDSWATCH: Weeds Early Evaluation for Detection in Seed, Waste, Agriculture, Terrorism, Commerce, and Habitat
Lead PI: Jonathan Fresnedo Ramirez, (College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences)
Co-investigators: Alyssa Essman, Eugene Law and Ram Yadav (College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences)
Project description: This project will develop a simple to implement, scalable, and complementary platform mining nucleic acid data using bioinformatics to enable the early identification of invasive and noxious weeds in the seedbank. The platform aims to safeguard agriculture, food security, and national defense.
Network Structures Shape Collective Responses to Embedded Misinformation
Lead PI: Kelly Garrett (College of Arts and Sciences)
Co-investigators: David Melamed and Duane Wegener (College of Arts and Sciences); Srinivasan Parthasarathy (College of Engineering)
Project description: This research uses network-based experiments to investigate how interactions between individuals, shaped by network topology, affect the formation of collective beliefs. The goal is to understand how misinformation remains entrenched in largely accurate networks.
Novel Recovery of Rare Earth Elements from Coal Mine Drainage
Lead PI: John Lenhart (College of Engineering)
Co-investigators: David Cole (College of Arts and Sciences)
Project description: This accelerator proposal will evaluate the selective recovery of rare earth elements from coal mine drainage. This data will provide needed preliminary results for a planned submission to the National Science Foundation Critical Aspects of Sustainability program in 2025.
Heterogeneous Transfer And Federated Learning For Digital Twin In Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Lead PI: Subhadeep Paul (College of Arts and Sciences)
Co-investigators: Debdipta Goswami (College of Engineering)
Project description: The ambitious concept of Digital Twin (DT), which can replicate complex physical systems such as aerial vehicles digitally, has received enormous interest from industry leaders, policymakers, and scientists. The team proposes trustworthy AI solutions to develop a DT for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Blood Outgrowth Endothelial Cells as a Biomarker of Cerebral Small Vessel Disease
Lead PI: Yousef Hannawi (College of Medicine)
Co-investigators: Erica Bell and Jay Zweier (College of Medicine); Ana Salazar Puerta (College of Engineering)
Project description: This study evaluates the role of blood outgrowth endothelial cells (BOECs) function as a biomarker of cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) including measurement of the disease severity. The team will also evaluate the changes of CD38 and NAD metabolic pathway of BOECs to better understand cSVD mechanisms.
A spatially organized and vascularized salivary gland-on-a-chip for toxicity studies and cancer research
Lead PI: Jonathan Song (College of Engineering)
Co-investigators: Xuefeng Liu (College of Medicine)
Project description: This team proposes to combine the techniques and technologies pioneered by the team of investigators towards the development of a novel salivary gland-on-a-chip (SG-chip). They expect this groundbreaking SG-chip technology to enable transformative salivary gland disease modeling studies
The Impact of Responsible AI Management (RAIM) on Organizational and Market Performance: An Econometric Study
Lead PI: Dennis Hirsch (College of Law)
Co-investigators: Aravind Chandrasekaran (College of Business)
Project description: This study examines the impact of Responsible AI Management (RAIM) practices on organizational performance. The team will use ISO 42001 certification as an indicator of RAIM adoption and apply econometric methods for the analysis.