Author: orandall

The globally endangered Baird’s tapir Tapirus bairdii is the largest native terrestrial mammal in Mesoamerica. Today, < 5,000 individuals are estimated to remain in the wild from Southeast Mexico to Northern Colombia. Baird’s tapirs are herbivorous, hindgut fermenters, that have long- distance movements. Due to this, tapirs play a key role in seed dispersal, hence influencing forest structure and composition (thus referred to as “gardeners of the forest”). In Costa Rica, tapirs occur in many habitats ranging from coastal ecosystems such as in Corcovado National Park, to highland ecosystems such as the paramo at the Talamanca Highlands. Costa Rica has one of the largest Baird’s tapir populations, although most individuals are restricted to protected areas.

We aim to institute a national Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii) health surveillance program by strengthening an already-established collaborative network with local communities, farmers, park rangers from the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC), laboratories, academic researchers, and other decision makers. This program will focus on tapir populations in the Tenorio-Miravalles Biological Corridor (TMBC), the Western Guanacaste Region (WGR), Northern Lowlands (NL), Western Talamanca Highlands (WTH), and the Osa Peninsula (OP). The establishment of a national health surveillance program is a key step for the conservation of tapirs in Costa Rica, which has one of the largest populations of Baird’s tapirs throughout their range.

We have partnered with the Costa Rica Wildlife Foundation (CRWF), a Costa Rican NGO which is leading tapir conservation in Costa Rica using cutting-edge research, educational outreach, and partnering with local communities and the government to find lasting solutions for achieving human-tapir coexistence. The proposed project is part of an ongoing research project based at the Tenorio-Miravalles Biological Corridor (TMBC), nestled between two protected areas: the Tenorio Volcano National Park (TNP) and the Miravalles Volcano National Park (MNP), in Northwestern, Costa Rica.

Funder: Morris Animal Foundation 

Amount: $144,126 

PI: Sonia Hernandez, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources 

Writers, poets and scientists have long tried to capture the mystery and magic of salt marshes. At the same time, interconnected social and ecological processes, including sea level rise and land loss, are dynamically transforming land-use for vulnerable coastal communities and habitat for coastal environments. Marsh landscapes have long been an unrecognized source of producing world views based in notions of abundance for Gullah Geechee communities. Documenting culturally important sites through human scale photography that have long sustained and generated deep ecological knowledge for Gullah Geechee communities can strengthen resiliency planning for many so-called marginal communities. This project will be based in Sapelo Island’s Hogg Hummock Community—the last intact Geechee Gullah community on the Georgia Sea Islands— and done in partnership with Save Our Legacy Ourself (SOLO), a Saltwater Geechee non-profit organization located in that community.

Funder: National Endowment for the Humanities 

Amount: $150,000 

PI: Nik Heynan, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Departments of Geography and Anthropology

Georgia Department of Natural Resources strives to continually improve its ability to manage white-tailed deer populations effectively. Understanding the knowledge of and preferences of hunters is important for partnering with them to manage deer populations. Also, accurately estimating the size of deer populations is necessary to design management programs to meet objectives. Chronic wasting disease is an infection in deer species which is contagious to other deer and always fatal for infected animals. The discovery of chronic wasting disease in Lanier County, Georgia in 2025 prompted Georgia Department of Natural Resources to begin use of the Chronic Wasting Disease Response Plan to develop a Chronic Wasting Disease Management Zone and to increase sampling for the disease. The first aim of this project is to design education which will engage hunters to help in the management of chronic wasting disease. The second aim of this project is to develop methods to efficiently estimate populations of deer at the county level which aids in the setting of seasons and other deer harvest strategies.

Funder: Georgia Department of Natural Resources 

Amount: $250,000 

PI: Gino D’Angelo, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources 

Pituitary neuroendocrine tumors (PitNETs) are rare and understudied heterogeneous tumors that are detrimental to health causing increased mortality and poor quality of life. Cushing’s disease (CD) is a serious endocrine disease caused by an adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)-secreting PitNET that subsequently stimulates the adrenal glands to overproduce cortisol. Chronic exposure to excess cortisol has several detrimental effects on health, including increased stroke rates, diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, and a threefold increase in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. Despite decades of research, current treatments for CD remain suboptimal, and the development of targeted therapies is challenging due to the limited knowledge of PitNET tumor cellular and molecular complexity. The RC2 will fund the National Biorepository and Resource for Pituitary Neuroendocrine Tumor Translational Research (BioPitNeT) which will be an open source, clinically relevant deep tumor phenotyping platform and biorepository. This is the first phase of a continuum of translational- and hypothesis-driven research that will accelerate the development of effective therapies for PitNETs, preventing tumor recurrences and improving remission rates and quality of life for patients. The BioPitNeT team will: 1) establish a large-scale unique resource within an infrastructure that will generate sustainable novel research tools benefiting investigators with focused translational research of PitNETs, and 2) implement interdisciplinary approaches and expertise to generate a resource that will foster translational and hypothesis-driven research in PitNET diseases. The Registry for Adenomas of the PItuitary and related Disorders (RAPID) is a twelve center US consortium founded in 2021 to improve treatment of patients with PitNETs and funded by grateful patients. The BioPitNet leverages the RAPID Consortium clinical platform to combine clinical annotations of future prospectively enrolled patients with molecular and pathological information using state-of-the-art preclinical models. The low incidence of CD requires multicenter collaboration and interdisciplinary team science partnerships between basic- and clinician-translational scientists comprising the expertise of professionals trained in complimentary fields including medical and surgical treatment, neuropathology, molecular genetics of PitNETs, molecular pathology and high-plex spatial imaging, organoid and iPSC technology, canine comparative oncology disease models and translational bioinformatics. The BioPitNeT will be established by the successful completion of Aim 1: To establish the BioPitNeT centralized biorepository comprising of resources that will be benchmarked to the patients’ PitNET tissue of origin, Aim 2: To develop a PitNET clinically relevant classification system for CD, and Aim 3: To establish a biobank of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSCs) lines genetically engineered to model corticotroph subtype PitNETs as a resource for investigating genetic underlying mechanisms of CD.

Funder: National Institutes of Health 

Amount: $613,844 

PI: Yana Zavros, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 

Through this research program, we propose to screen relevant drugs (Dexa/EXA) in canine intestinal organoids {Milestone 1} establish, for the first time, an in vitro model of chronic kidney disease in dogs {Milestone 2} and cats {Milestone 3}. These novel models will then be cultured either with or without TNF-α and ideal study parameters will be established {Milestone 4}. Finally, canine and feline peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) will be added to the models to study the effects of dapagliflozin (SGLT-2 inhibitor, DAPA), exenatide (GLP1R agonist, EXA) and spironolactone (mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, SPIRO) on markers of epithelial integrity and (pro-) inflammatory cytokine expression {Milestone 5}.

Funder: Ceva Sante Animale 

Amount: $969,578 

PI: Jonathan Mochel, College of Veterinary Medicine 

The David Ralston Center on Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities proposes to conduct an evaluation of the Opioid Settlement Fund Grants. This evaluation will enable the trust fund to be strategic in its spending of funds targeted at addressing Opioid-related gaps and needs across the state. Findings from the evaluation will help ensure the settlement funds are spent wisely to address identified needs and create positive outcomes on the Continuum of Care (CoC) for Opioids. Findings from this evaluation will help provide direction and guidance for subsequent grant funding cycles in terms of focusing on the specific needs of Georgians by region, CoC focus areas, as well as the overall grant application process and documents. The evaluation will help us better understand the impact of the Opioid Settlement fund investments on services and outcomes and the lessons that funded projects can teach us about how to invest opioid settlement grant dollars more effectively in the future. This evaluation will focus on two key objectives:

Objective 1. Round One Grants Assessment and Gap Analysis: To conduct an overall assessment of Opioid Round One grants with respect to addressing the gaps identified in the Statewide Assessment and provide strategic recommendations to enable data-driven decision-making and guide the focus of future grants.

Objective 2. Outcomes Evaluation of Randomly Selected Individual Projects: To conduct an outcomes evaluation of a few randomly selected projects in each of the CoC areas of focus (prevention, treatment, recovery, harm reduction).

Funder: GA Dept. of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities

Amount: $347,064

PI: Hamida Jinnah, College of Family and Consumer Sciences

When natural selection is strong, evolutionary changes in populations may operate on the same time scale as ecological changes, leading to the entanglement of ecological and evolutionary dynamics. These eco-evo dynamics connect two central questions in ecology and evolutionary biology: What allows species to persist and maintain biodiversity, and what preserves the genetic diversity of populations? Both questions relate to stability, the first to ecological stability and the second to evolutionary stability. Here, we use “stability” to broadly encompass both the persistence of species/genes and the dampening of fluctuations in population abundance and genotype frequency. Spatial heterogeneity and the movement of individuals/genotypes throughout a landscape promote the stability of population dynamics and generate balancing selection. The factors facilitating both ecological and evolutionary stability are the same: if some species/genotypes are favored in some but not all areas, and if there is enough dispersal to link populations across the landscape, then the diversity of species/genotypes can be maintained. In ecology, much of the research on stability focuses on predator-prey (or consumer-resource) interactions, as understanding their stability is challenging both theoretically and empirically. Similarly, predator-prey coevolution has been extensively studied because predators can exert strong pressures that result in selection for prey resistance. Thus, ecological and evolutionary stability is central to understanding predator-prey systems. We will investigate the stability of eco-evo dynamics in a host-parasitoid system.

Our study will test the hypothesis that spatiotemporal variation in population abundances and selection pressures stabilize the eco-evo dynamics of pea aphids and a parasitoid, A. ervi, combining laboratory and field experiments with theoretical models to understand eco-evo stability. Eco-evo models fitted to the experimental data will quantify the strength of spatiotemporal variation in maintaining diversity. Finally, theoretical models will extend our qualitative findings to other systems that involve genetic recombination, predator-prey trait matching, and coevolution of prey resistance and predator counter measures.

We will focus on broader impacts in education and outreach. For education, we will expand current lab initiatives to foster diversity within the pipeline of the next generation of biologists, focusing on high school (through the federal Upward Bound program and UGA’s Young Scholars Program) and freshmen/sophomore undergraduates with no prior research experience. We aim to provide students with STEM experiences that broaden their understanding of science and inspire them to pursue scientific careers. In our graduate students, we will instill an ethos for engaging a broad audience in science through participation in educational programs at high school and college levels, and in outreach events to our local communities. We will also engage farmers: while evolution in agriculture is familiar from selective breeding and the evolution of resistance of insect pests and weeds to pesticides, the role of evolution and natural selection in shaping the impacts of pests on crops is likely unfamiliar. In fact, this is a topic that we personally want to understand better.

Funder: NSF

Amount: $509,821

PI: Kerry Oliver, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Department of Entomology

Similar to the step-like improvement seen during the advent of ocean surface topography in the early 1990s, the NASA Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite will revolutionize oceanography by measuring large spatial regions with unprecedented detail, enabling scientists to answer previously unanswerable questions. One such long-standing question has been how meridionally connected is the shelf circulation on the Northwest Atlantic shelf? Addressing this question will simultaneously address the fate of Arctic- and Greenland-sourced meltwater that accumulates on the Newfoundland and Labrador shelf and could impact the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, as well as the predictability of ocean properties on the Northwest Atlantic Shelf that is home to one of the most productive ecosystems globally and has experienced accelerated warming in the recent decade. Previous attempts to answer this question have not been able to convincingly cover the large spatial scales of the region while simultaneously resolving its fine-scale structure. High-resolution ocean surface topography from SWOT provides the first glimpse of this entire system on its natural scales, enabling us to address the net effect of sub mesoscale features such as the coastal currents, shelfbreak jets, shelfbreak eddies, and cross-shelf streamers on the large-scale connectivity of the shelf. Here, we hypothesize that the equatorward flow over the Northwest Atlantic shelf is a leaky conduit with exchange from the shelf and open ocean that has been increasing through time. To address this hypothesis, we have structured a project around the SWOT ocean surface topography data of the Northwest Atlantic shelf spanning Davis Strait to Cape Hatteras. Our overarching goal is to answer where, when, and why shelf-basin occurs over the study region and whether the amount of this exchange has been increasing through time. We have divided the project into three components: (1) validation of the SWOT data using a wide array of in situ data collected from moorings, drifters, gliders, and ships, (2) analysis of the meridional connectivity and persistence of the shelf circulation, and (3) process studies of hypothesized hot spots of shelf-basin exchange at the retroflection of the Labrador Current, the Northeast Channel of the Gulf of Maine, the separation of the Gulf Stream from the shelf at Cape Hatteras, and time-dependent impingements of warm core rings on the Mid-Atlantic Bight shelfbreak. In each of the latter two work packages, we plan to initially examine the processes with the high-resolution SWOT data and then compare the results to the along-track and gridded sea-surface height derived from the nadir altimeters. Through this analysis, we plan to leverage the high spatial resolution of SWOT with the high-frequency temporal sampling and extended time scales of the nadir altimeters to test our hypothesis and gain a better understanding of the equatorward flow over the Northwestern Atlantic shelf. The team from the University of Georgia and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has extensive experience in coastal oceanography on the Northwest Atlantic, including the use of remote sensing products, in situ observations, and ocean modeling

Funder: NASA

Amount: $919,630

PI: Nicholas Foukal, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Marine Sciences

Chagas disease (American trypanosomiasis) is the highest-impact infectious disease in Latin America and a growing threat in the United States. The result of infection with the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi, Chagas disease has been described as the “most neglected of the neglected diseases.” As a result of the large number of host and vector species infectable by T. cruzi, as well as the variety of conditions under which transmission can occur, the possibility of eradicating T. cruzi is extremely low. Despite the success of vector control efforts in reducing the transmission of T. cruzi in the southern cone of South America, Chagas disease remains the highest-impact parasitic disease in the Americas, resulting in yearly losses of more than 50,000 lives and 0.586 million disability-adjusted life years. Several experimental vaccines have demonstrated that induced immunity can bring experimental infections more rapidly and effectively under control, but none have been shown to prevent infection or to provide parasitological cure. A key factor preventing use of current drugs and the development of safer and more effective new drugs is the low level of Trypanosoma cruzi parasites in the blood of infected subjects, which makes discrimination of an active infection from a resolved (cured) infection, difficult. The goal of this project is to complete adaptation of the rapid and inexpensive T. cruzi UltraPCR method for high sensitivity detection of T. cruzi, validate its use for confirming infection and monitoring treatment impact, and provide the justification for ultimately deploying this assay for human and veterinary diagnostic use.

Funder: NIH

Amount: $2,441,786

PI: Rick Tarleton, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Cellular Biology

Climate-smart (CS) agriculture produces food, fiber, and fuel using less resources, optimizing land-use efficiency, and mitigating pollution of air, water, and soils. Row crops are a major agricultural system in Southeast U.S., covering 4 million acres in FL, GA, and AL. Most of this area (95%) is fallow in the winter after harvesting the summer row crops. There is an opportunity to integrate value-added CS Winter Cropping Systems to generate income and economic development while providing ecosystem services including soil protection from erosion, habitat for pollinators, soil organic carbon sequestration, and reduction of nitrate leaching. Project CHEERS addresses USDA’s priority areas of climate smart agriculture and strengthening bioeconomy. This project will form a hub of diverse stakeholder groups including farmers and various enabling agencies and communities such as Extension professionals, CS commodity industry, federal agencies, and academia to address these objectives: 1. Identify long-term behavioral patterns related to CS Winter Cropping Systems among producers; 2. Analyze farm level economic and environmental trade-offs between current and CS Winter Cropping Systems; 3. Equip multiple stakeholders with decision support platforms to assess farm and regional scale economic and environmental trade-offs between current and CS Winter Cropping Systems; 4. Co-design, co-develop, share, and implement actionable science; 5. Inspire and instruct the next generation. This project will enhance economic outcomes of rural stakeholders, reduce entry barriers for beginning farmers, sustainably intensify agricultural production, and create equitable pathways for the next generation of agricultural professionals to play a vital role in the climate-smart bioeconomy.

Funder: USDA NIFA via the University of Florida

Amount: $1,250,000

PI: Daniel Geller, College of Engineering