Category: Notable Grants

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

Novel technologies for crop improvement are needed to face the global societal and climate change challenges. Apomixis, i.e., asexual reproduction through seeds, is a key enabling technology for plant breeding and seed production. Unfortunately, available apomixis technologies are inefficient and a proof of concept (PoC) is currently limited to maize and rice.

The major goal of the ApoSoy project is to develop robust apomictic breeding and seed production systems for soybean. For this purpose, new genes to engineer the three elements of apomixis (apomeiosis, parthenogenesis and autonomous endosperm) will be identified and evaluated using novel tools in Arabidopsis, Cenchrus spp., tomato and rice. These novel genes and tools can then be used to custom engineer robust apomixis in a broad range of crops. As a PoC, these novel technologies will be introduced into soybean to demonstrate the feasibility of engineering efficient apomixis in a strictly self-fertilizing, dicot crop. Such self-fertilizing dicot crops often have the potential for expression of hybrid vigor when crossed but lack a commercially feasible hybrid production system. In the long-term, apomixis technology will allow (i) clonal seed production, (ii) shorter breeding cycles, (iii) fixation of hybrid vigor, (iv) true seed propagation of vegetative crops, and (v) transgene containment. Moreover, individual elements of apomixis can also be used to facilitate (vi) breeding of Page 1 of 35 ApoSoy – Confidential Application polyploid varieties of diploid crops, (vii) haploid production and reverse breeding, and (viii) artificial seed production.

ApoSoy brings together partners with complementary expertise to develop novel and efficient apomixis technologies and to successfully implement the four-year project, including apomeiosis (Underwood/Ozias-Akins), parthenogenesis (Boutilier/Dresselhaus/Grossniklaus) and autonomous endosperm (Figueiredo/Gehring), as well as a professional project management and communication partner (Rohner).

Funder: Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research

Amount: $659,080

PI: Peggy Ozias-Akins, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Compound floods (CFs), a combination of hydrologic and coastal flood processes, are a worldwide phenomenon that affects coastal communities within a tropical cyclone’s (TC) path and low-lying urbanized landscapes prone to high tides and extreme rainfall events. CF assessments and their modeling tools have become widely available in recent years (mid-2010s) but have failed to understand the physical interaction between flood drivers, which can lead to better coupling techniques and modeling outputs, such as flood mitigation solutions (FMS). Furthermore, local knowledge (LK) and citizen science have been traditionally overlooked as only inputs in the FMS planning phase and not throughout the entire design process, resulting in a less salient solution for the community. Thus, there is a clear disconnection between CF modeling approaches, LK, and FMS. The overall objective of this project is to integrate and improve current flood modeling techniques with LK concepts to improve the interaction of flood drivers during CF events and include LK as an input variable. At the completion of the proposed research, we will develop a one-of-a-kind modeling framework capable of assessing CF holistically. Moreover, we will produce an adaptable methods handbook to guide future endeavors to include LK and citizen science in any flood modeling framework and co-develop FMS with stakeholders and community members. These outcomes are expected to have an important positive impact on the general flood science community and provide direct and immediate support to the impacted communities in an equitable manner.

Funder: NSF

Amount: $999,732

PI: Felix Santiago Collazo, College of Engineering

This is a standard proposal (SP) to the ECDRE program. We propose to develop a dynamic risk model and climate suitability model based on existing climate data and current observational/experimental data to be generated through these research objectives: (1) document the distribution of HLB and ACP in cold-hardy citrus growing regions of south Georgia, north Florida and east-central California, (2) evaluate preference of ACP to cold-hardy citrus cultivars, (3) determine the titer of CLas in trees following exposure to cold and freezing events, and (4) tolerance and acclimatization in ACP populations to cold and determine underlying mechanisms in the insect’s body to these adaptations. The proposal addresses three priority areas stated by the Citrus Disease Subcommittee (CDS) and ECDRE program: (#2) regional management or eradication of ACP, (#3) predictive models of psyllids movement and dispersal, early detection of HLB, and (#9) greater understanding of the ecology and interactions of the citrus production system and HLB disease complex. Citrus production acreage in areas with cool winter temperatures is increasing and the sustainability of cold-hardy citrus production in parts of California, Florida and Georgia. The lack of scientific studies on the effect of cold on both CLas and ACP populations leaves cold-hardy citrus production in US at risk and must be addressed. Our proposed objectives will provide basic information on the influence of cold on vector and pathogen biology, which would help in developing region-specific risk models to help in decision-making process for effective sampling, surveillance and future expansion of groves.

Funder: USDA NIFA

Amount: $1,121,019

PI: Apurba Barman, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

The bacterial cell envelope is a multi-layered structure that performs a variety of critical functions such as providing protection from physical and chemical insults, including antibiotics. The cell envelope is essential to viability but how cell envelope biogenesis is regulated is poorly understood. Gram-negative bacteria are characterized by a cell envelope with three layers: an inner membrane composed of glycerophospholipids (GPLs), a cell wall made up of peptidoglycan (PG), and an asymmetric outer membrane in which the inner leaflet is comprised of GPLs and the outer leaflet is enriched in lipopolysaccharide (LPS). The biosynthetic pathways responsible for the production of LPS, PG, and GPLs rely on shared precursor pools. Specifically, LPS and GPLs both require acyl-acyl carrier proteins and LPS and PG both require UDP-N-acetylglucosamine. Thus, although it is important that enough LPS, PG, and GPLs are produced to support growth, it is critical that each biosynthetic pathway is tightly controlled to prevent runaway flux that could deplete the shared precursor and indirectly inhibit the production of another essential cell envelope component. Despite the importance of balanced cell envelope biosynthesis, little is known about the regulatory systems that control cell envelope biogenesis outside of classical model systems. Work in my laboratory is focused on identifying and characterizing the various processes that regulate cell envelope biosynthesis in Gram-negative bacteria, with a particular focus on the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. I previously found that, in P. aeruginosa, the LPS and PG biosynthetic pathways are coordinated through a regulatory interaction between their committed enzymes, LpxC and MurA, respectively. Genetically uncoupling LPS and PG biogenesis resulted in measurable phenotypic changes such as loss of viability and alterations to cellular morphology, highlighting the importance of maintaining balanced cell envelope biosynthesis. Current studies in my laboratory have identified additional factors that appear to influence the equilibrium between LPS and PG production, indicating that the regulation of these pathways is multi-faceted. Over the next five years, my group will seek to further clarify the regulation of cell envelope biogenesis in P. aeruginosa using a combination of genetics, biochemistry, cell biology. The goals of this proposal are to (i) dissect the molecular basis of LPS and PG coordination along with the physiological consequences of uncoupling the two pathways, (ii) characterize two novel regulators of cell envelope biogenesis, and (iii) define the array of factors that control LPS, PG, and GPL production in P. aeruginosa. In addition to laying the groundwork for future therapeutic development in an organism infamous for antibiotic resistance, this work has the potential to provide insight into fundamental principles that govern bacterial physiology and cell envelope biosynthesis.

Funder: NIH

Amount: $1,806,485

PI: Katherine Hummels, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Microbiology

Neuroinflammation is a key aspect of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) pathology. Extracellular alpha-synuclein (aSyn) aggregates influence immune responses in both the central nervous system (CNS) and periphery. The preformed fibril (PFF) aSyn rodent model of PD effectively mimics many PD features, including dopaminergic cell loss, behavioral deficits, and widespread α-synuclein inclusions. In the PFF α-syn model, PFF α-syn seeds promote endogenous aSyn recruitment, leading to synuclein propagation and neurodegeneration. Neuroinflammation has been confirmed in rats and mice post-PFF α-syn injection, though conflicting reports raise questions about its presence in mice. The study aimed to identify variables affecting inflammatory phenotypes in PFF aSyn mice, including endotoxin (LPS) in aSyn preparation, species-specific aSyn characteristics, and animal facility conditions. In the original study, we found that inflammatory phenotypes were more pronounced in mice with endotoxin-removed PFF aSyn. Species-matched mouse PFF aSyn induced inflammatory phenotypes in non-transgenic wild-type mice. Consistency in inflammatory phenotypes was observed across different facilities, depending on previous results. This supplementary study aimed to further explore inflammatory responses and validate findings, including the role of peripheral immune cells in brain regions with p-aSyn pathology and gliosis. The study’s completion will establish quality control guidelines and profiles of inflammatory factors in PFF aSyn mice.

Funder: Michael J. Fox Foundation

Amount: $259,169

PI: Jae Kyung Lee, College of Veterinary Medicine