Author: orandall

While the model is based on a theory of change, which reflects a growing initiative to establish a national Romanian model of outreach and engagement, this overall endeavor has the potential to establish a paradigm shift in the Romanian university system to drive valuable research into the collaborative realm with rural farming communities. The Romanian agricultural landscape provides a rich heritage worthy of preserving and the capacity for significant growth and viability within the European market. Therefore, it is exciting to be a host institution that provides Romanian scholars the space, time, resources, and structure to thoughtfully and critically explore avenues through which a national model can be established. The objectives for this project are 1) for UGA to serve as a host institution that provides a rich and fully immersive semester-long experience in Georgia’s statewide UGA Extension system, and 2) for Fulbright-RAF Scholars to be fully equipped to actively engage in the design and implementation of programming focused on rural economic development in Romania.

Funder: Council on International Educational Exchange

Amount: $105,000

PI: Abigail Borron

This REU Site award at the University of Georgia (UGA) aims to attract and retain underrepresented minority and female students from institutions with limited research opportunities in science and engineering and prepare them for graduate programs and careers in these fields. Nanobiotechnology research is an emerging interdisciplinary area at the interface of nanotechnology and biomedicine. This three-year project provides an interdisciplinary research experience to undergraduate students, leveraging the diverse interdisciplinary expertise, resources, and training opportunities. Ten REU students over a 10-week summer program each year will participate in interdisciplinary research projects that apply nanotechnology to specific biomedical questions. Each REU student will be co-mentored by paired faculty from the nanotechnology and biomedical disciplines on a collaborative research project. This REU experience will recruit students from diverse backgrounds. Over 60% of participants will come from academic institutions where research opportunities are limited, over 70% will be underrepresented minorities, and over 80% will be females. This recruitment is expected to broaden participation within the next generation of scientists and engineers in interdisciplinary research endeavors.

The existing world-class programs, facilities, collaborative research culture, and inclusive environments at the university create a strong setting for this interdisciplinary site. Students will be recruited nationwide with particular emphasis on students who are underrepresented/underserved minorities (URM) and females from STEM limited institutions. Through the program, students will (1) design hypotheses-driven research experiments to solve biomedical problems with engineering tools; (2) develop skills for conducting interdisciplinary research; (3) gain confidence and a sense of self-efficacy to participate in science and engineering research, (4) develop a greater understanding and appreciation for the benefits of interdisciplinary research. Research mentors will also gain expertise in mentoring URM and female students in interdisciplinary research.

Funder: NSF

Amount: $459,856

PI: Leidong Mao

This REU Site award to the University of Georgia located in Athens, GA, will support the training of 13 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2023- 2025. It is anticipated that a total of 39 students, primarily from schools with limited research opportunities or are from an under-represented group, will be trained in the program. The program is run in partnership with Clark Atlanta University, an HBCU located in Atlanta, GA. The program has been in existence for 22 years and has trained over 200 REU participants who have contributed to fundamental discoveries about telomerase, gene regulation, the biological clock, and the biochemistry of red tides. All REU participants are expected to present their research at national meetings, and about 15% are expected to publish their research findings in peer-reviewed journals. Assessment of the program will be done through the online SALG URSSA tool used by all BIO REU sites. Students will be required to register their participation in the NSF ETAP system (etap.nsf.gov) and tracked after the program in order to determine their career paths.

The scientific focus of this program is on genomics, computational biology, systems biology, metabolomics, proteomics, and glycomics. Faculty mentors come from various departments and centers, including Genetics, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Institute of Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, Plant Biology, Plant Pathology, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, Microbiology, and Communication. Applications are done online at http://www.genetics.uga.edu/FGCB. Students from groups under-represented in STEM and those from schools with limited research opportunities are especially encouraged to apply. In addition to developing a research project over 10 weeks, students participate in bioethics and communication training, seminars, and workshops hosted by seven other interlocking REU sites on the UGA campus. Past research projects on this REU site have included the study of the biological clock, telomerase, adaptive immunity through CRISPR/CAS systems, novel algorithms for network reconstruction, identification of network motifs, and constructing large scale database tools in systems biology.

Funder: NSF

Amount: $598,691

PI: Nathan Arnold

Project Summary The influence of broader community contexts on children’s neurocognitive development and risk for downstream drug misuse is significant. The focus of this proposal is on low-income children who reside in rural Georgia. Being poor in the rural South is particularly challenging for families. Emerging research suggests that rural vs. urban poverty is characterized by distinct risk and protective factors that have unique effects on children’s neural and socioemotional development. These differences underscore the unique contextual risk and protective factors that affect the development of drug use vulnerability among rural youth. Informed by an ecological developmental neuroscience perspective, we purport that neural markers of vulnerability cannot be understood in isolation from children’s experience of their ecological contexts. The proposed study is among the first to integrate neural assessments with multidimensional assessments of environmental stressors and protective processes in rural communities and begins following children at age 7 during a sensitive developmental period for life-course-persistent effects on drug use vulnerability. Our core premise posits that the efficiency of cognitive control systems (cognitive control networks [CCN]) in modulating socioemotional systems (emotion, reward, and salience networks [ERSN]) is a mechanism linking rural children’s exposure to adversity to their drug use vulnerabilities. We consider the multidimensional nature of adversity and specify environmental experiences associated with threat, deprivation, and unpredictability. However, considerable individual differences exist in the pathway linking adversity to drug use vulnerability, a product of children’s exposure to family, peer, school, and community protective processes. We propose to recruit 265 low-income, rural children (age 7) and their primary caregivers into a prospective cohort study (following children from ages 7 to 10). Children will participate in fMRI scans to assess CCN modulation of the ERSN. To assess exposure to adversity and social-ecological protective factors, we will obtain rich multi-level information that can be used to test the following aims: 1) the influence of childhood adversity on neural risk mechanisms, 2) the indirect influence of adversity on drug use vulnerability via neural risk mechanisms, and 3) the moderating influence of family, peer, school, and community protective factors on the links between childhood adversity neural risk as well as between neural risk and drug use vulnerabilities. Multi-level research that effectively connects rural contexts, neuroimaging, and behavioral data is critical for advancing the precision and specificity of developmental models of drug use resilience for this population.

Funder: NIH

Amount: $3,264,082

PI: Assaf Oshri

The long-term goal of The Digital and Data-Driven Demonstration Farm (4-D Farm) is to develop climate-smart production systems leveraging renewable energy, automation, intelligence and human capital to meet the required food and fiber needs of a burgeoning world population. Most currently funded research is driven by individual commodity and discipline needs and rarely investigates integrating multiple agricultural enterprises to improve farm resilience so that the farmer does not have all their “eggs in one basket”. In this project, data-driven farm strategies will be implemented to create an interdependent and diverse crop/livestock rotation that addresses the reduced effectiveness of chemical inputs, climate change effects, feeding an increasing population, loss of biodiversity and pollinators, water quality/quantity, rural economic stability, labor shortages and supply chain disruptions. These issues are addressed by the 4-D Farm: 1) Creating data-driven, integrated precision and climate-smart agriculture with intelligent automation technologies and solutions, 2) Developing and testing resilient agricultural practices and 3) Assessing the socioeconomic consequences of these new technologies and practices. The 4-D farm will be executed on a 90-acre D.A.T.A. (Demonstrating Applied Technology in Ag) farm at the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC), multiple Emerging Techology and Demonstration Site’s (ETDS’s) located on University of Georgia (UGA) research farms, and a Data Management and Analysis Center at the UGA Tifton Campus, Future Farmstead Carriage House. We have assembled an inter-disciplinary team in precision and climate-smart agriculture, data science, livestock management, peanut, cotton, and corn production, extension and education programming, and autonomous and intelligent rover research and development.

Funder: USDA NIFA

Amount: $3,999,359

PI: Glen Rains

Bridge and culvert design primarily involves safely passing floods and debris while minimizing instability and maintenance requirements. However, innovative bridge and culvert designs also have the potential to reduce wildlife-vehicle conflicts (WVCs) by facilitating the safe passage of wildlife beneath roadways. An estimated 1-2 million crashes between motor vehicles and large animals occur annually in the U.S., causing approximately 200 human deaths, 26,000 injuries, and at least $8 billion in property damage and other costs (Pew 2021). Georgia is among the 20 states with the highest risk of WVCs (State Farm 2020). Current bridge and culvert design methods do not include guidance on incorporating elements that simultaneously reduce the likelihood of WVCs while improving hydraulic performance and climate resilience to achieve a higher level of public safety. Further, permitting of structures by environmental agencies is sometimes delayed by wildlife passage concerns. Thus, there is an opportunity to concurrently address these concerns while enhancing public safety and infrastructure resiliency.

• Funder: Georgia Department of Transportation
• Amount: $100,000
• PI: Brian Bledsoe

Microcontroller units (MCUs) drive many security- and safety-critical embedded applications. However, they inherit software bugs present in all computing systems. Firmware vulnerabilities have thus become one of the main targets of real-world exploitation. Successful exploitation can cause disastrous consequences to critical infrastructures (e.g., power outages and plant damage) and endanger human lives (e.g., by disabling a pacemaker). In the software community, there has been a rich body of knowledge regarding bug discovery and attack mitigation. However, it is notoriously difficult to apply these results to MCU firmware. Indeed, MCU firmware runs on resource-constrained hardware with heterogeneous architectures, integrates custom runtime environments, and makes unpredictable interactions with the physical world. This renders existing dynamic analysis techniques incompatible, expensive, and ineffective. The proposed research will cross the technical barriers imposed by the aforementioned challenges and greatly enrich the arsenal of MCU firmware security with new knowledge, frameworks, analysis tools, and supporting techniques. Due to the critical roles that MCU devices take in real life, this project will make huge progress towards securing the cyberspace and enhancing national security.

A key observation of this project is that MCU devices usually cannot operate by themselves. Rather, they have to rely on certain external computers in their entire life cycles. Therefore, around a unifying theme of offloading security analysis from the original application workload to more capable nearby workstations or hubs, this project will deliver a series of new methodologies and theories to significantly improve the lifetime security of MCU devices. With the decoupled design, three research thrusts will be investigated. The first thrust focuses on new techniques to automatically discover firmware vulnerabilities, such as bugs lurking deeply in the program space. The second thrust targets run-time monitoring of firmware execution in the production environment, allowing the stakeholders to detect ongoing attacks and catch bugs that never happen during in-house testing. The third thrust, cooperating with the second thrust, investigates vulnerability remediation techniques, in particular, how to efficiently diagnose production bugs without leaking privacy. The outcomes of this research will be freely distributed to the community. This research will also be integrated into the investigator’s education plan to develop a set of Virtual Machine-based labs to educate young minds and future embedded system developers and architects about MCU security.

• Funder: NSF
• Amount: $532,587
• PI: Le Guan

Many animals rely on microbial symbionts to help them gain sufficient nutrients, provide protection from predators and pathogens, or allow them to live in otherwise inhospitable environments. Studying these relationships can be difficult as it is often impossible to separate the microbes from their host. As a result, understanding of the mechanisms that underly these relationships has been limited by the inability to manipulate both host and symbiont independently. Kissing bugs are insects that feed exclusively on vertebrate blood and serve as host to symbiotic bacteria, that help them successfully develop and reproduce. These bacteria also can be cleared from the kissing bugs and infected with new bacteria. The symbiont bacteria can also be grown outside of the insect and can be genetically altered. This system, thus, provides a unique opportunity to experimentally manipulate the host and symbiont, to identify and characterize factors that support the symbiosis. The research will focus on genes involved in symbiont colonization of the host, host and symbiont genes involved in the exchange of nutrients, and interactions of the host immune system and the symbiont. Given the ubiquity of animal-microbe symbioses, this research will illuminate mechanisms that may govern host-microbe interactions in other less-tractable systems. Along with the proposed research, this project will also provide research experience and training to high school teachers. This experience will be paired with curriculum development to incorporate host-microbe interactions into the teachers’ classrooms.

Experimental manipulation of host-microbe systems has been limited by inability to separate highly integrated partners or difficulties disentangling the effects of individual members in highly complex communities. Triatomine kissing bugs harbor essential symbionts in their gut which are environmentally acquired each generation, allowing for generation of bacteria-free, axenic insects, which can then be experimentally inoculated with bacteria. This work leverages the unique features of this system – ability to generate axenic and gnotobiotic insects, low-complexity microbiomes, and molecular tools – to delineate the mechanistic basis of symbiosis. Transposon mutagenesis will be used to identify genes in the symbiont Rhodococcus rhodnii that are essential for symbiosis followed by generation of knockout strains of R. rhodnii lacking symbiosis-promoting genes. Knockout strains will be used for bioassays to characterize the role of the gene-of-interest in the relationship. The role of the host immune system in regulating bacterial abundance will be assessed, examining both humoral and cellular immune responses to symbionts. Lipid metabolism genes including fatty acid synthases and fatty acid CoA reductases have been identified as differentially expressed in axenic and gnotobiotic insects. Liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy will be applied to understand how symbiotic bacteria shape the lipidome of kissing bugs while silencing of specific lipid genes will reveal the role of these genes in lipid metabolism and host fitness. The proposed work will shed new light on the evolution of host-symbiont interactions and serve as a framework for exploring systems which are less amenable to experimental manipulation.

• Funder: NSF
• Amount: $1,067,638
• PI: Kevin Vogel

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Ca2+ ions impact almost every aspect of cellular life. Ca2+ signaling begins with the opening of Ca2+ channels in either the plasma membrane (PM) or the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and results in a dramatic increase in the physiologically low (<100 nM) cytosolic Ca2+ levels. The temporal and spatial Ca2+ levels are exquisitely regulated and enable the precise and specific activation of critical biological processes like changes in gene expression, cell differentiation, muscle contraction, fertilization, or secretion of neurotransmitters to name a few. Ca2+ signaling regulates pathogenic pathways of apicomplexan parasites like Toxoplasma gondii which infects approximately one third of the world’s population. T. gondii is an opportunistic pathogen of immunocompromised patients like HIV-infected individuals, fetuses, and organ transplant recipients. As an obligate intracellular pathogen, T. gondii replicates inside cells and the clinical manifestations of toxoplasmosis are a direct result of its growth within cells and its dissemination. T. gondii relies on Ca2+ signals for the stimulation of specific features of its infection cycle and several Ca2+ signaling elements play essential roles in its parasitic cycle. However, the fundamental elements that initiate Ca2+ signals in T. gondii are largely unknown yet are likely essential for its viability and virulence. Discovery and characterization of the molecules that initiate Ca2+ signaling in T. gondii are hence central for the understanding of its pathogenesis. Active egress of T. gondii from host cells is critical for dissemination of the infection and our prior work has provided conclusive evidence that there is a cytosolic Ca2+ peak preceding egress. This parasitic cytosolic increase arises from release from intracellular stores, likely the endoplasmic reticulum. It is puzzling, however, that intracellular parasites replicate surrounded by the low host cytosolic Ca2+ but still store sufficient Ca2+ in their ER to trigger egress. Upon host cell rupture, extracellular Ca2+ influx across the PM contributes to a second Ca2+ peak enhancing motility of parasites, which then exit and seek another host cell to invade. Our hypothesis is that PM Ca2+ entry is essential for refilling of intracellular Ca2+ stores, and both intra and extracellular sources are necessary for triggering the cascade of molecular events that lead to the stimulation of parasitic functions like motility, secretion of adhesins, invasion of host cells, egress and dissemination. In this proposal we aim to characterize the proteins that enable PM Ca2+ influx. There is almost no information about the functional characteristics and roles of Ca2+ channels in T. gondii. This lack of knowledge could be due to lack of appropriate tools, techniques, and training in electrophysiology within the molecular parasitology field. We address this void with a collaboration with a mammalian electrophysiologist and a modeler. Channels are critical for the successful unicellular life of parasites, and they could be targeted by many therapeutically useful agents. Ion channels remain significantly under-exploited as therapeutic targets, even more so as antiparasitic agents.

• Funder: NIH
• Amount: $3,024,775
• PI: Silvia Moreno

Driven by the demand in artificial intelligence (AI) in manufacturing, in partnership with the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs (RICE), we propose the creation of an advanced mobile manufacturing outreach laboratory that serves as a physical and digital gateway for current and future entrepreneurs to gain exposure to state-of-the-art technology, generate value-adding ideas, and receive formal training. The mobile laboratory will provide exemplary training modules and connected equipment where they are needed most, among communities of entrepreneurs that are historically underrepresented in manufacturing and thus have the greatest untapped potential for advancing the industry and at the same time promoting job growth through small business opportunities. The mobile laboratory will provide participants with three types of educational delivery mechanisms: (1) state of the art technology vignettes, (2) modules for participants to complete on-site, and (3) an off-site module participants can use for virtual reality (VR) based training that includes an entrepreneurial component.  The Vignettes will be developed by RICE while the on-site and off-site modules will be built, developed, and maintained by UGA.  The three mechanisms are meant to offer participants an opportunity to understand, apply, and create manufacturing AI projects.  Further, the offerings provide participants with a varying level of engagement with the mobile laboratory depending on their implementation readiness.  The goal is to cater to a wide range of participants while providing multiple modes of experiences, spanning multiple educational goals.

• Funder: US Department of Commerce via the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs
• Amount: $3,600,000
• PI: Jaime Camelio