Research Team Awards

Mass gun violence is one of the most pressing challenges facing the United States, and it has deeply affected Colorado. Colorado has witnessed several defining mass shootings, starting in 1999 with the shooting at Columbine High School and numerous events that have followed. In addition to the high issue salience of mass gun violence in Colorado, the state is characterized by political and cultural diversity. Despite these seeming contradictions, Colorado has passed many gun safety policies, including child access prevention laws, universal background checks, extreme risk protection orders, age restrictions, and waiting periods for firearm purchases [1-4]. Mass shootings have prompted considerable policy debate, yet relatively little empirical research has investigated how local political, social, institutional, and resource contexts impact preventative strategies and policy outcomes. Colorado constitutes an excellent case for understanding the processes whereby policies are successfully passed, the challenges of implementation, and the outcomes of such policies.

The project proposed here explores how local governments in Colorado respond to mass shootings through the adoption and implementation of gun violence prevention (GVP) policies. Using a comparative approach, this research will analyze differences between Colorado jurisdictions in terms of GVP policy development, implementation, and effectiveness. It will use a mixed methods approach to analyze the measurable effects of GVP policies in Colorado and provide insights into the contextual factors (e.g., political environment, local leadership, institutional resources, and community capacity) that support or impede effective responses to mass gun violence. The results of this research will not only advance the scholarship focused on GVP policy but will also inform evidence-based strategies that stakeholders, including local governments, can use to reduce the risk of mass gun violence. Consequently, this research will contribute to broader fields of public safety, public policy, and community resilience. 

The Center for Community Safety and Resilience (CCSR) at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs envisions thriving individuals and families in safe and supportive communities. CCSR advances that vision through working toward individual and community safety, resilience, and justice in research, education, outreach, and training. CCSR faculty and students already focus on issues related to GVP, individual and community resilience, and crisis and disaster policy, making it a vibrant and appropriate home for this research. If funded, this project would provide a centerpiece for CCSR in research, education, training, and outreach as it works to attract funding, grow its regional and national reputation, and support students.

CU Denver’s strategic plan prioritizes “partnering to solve societal problems…and elevate communities,” which this project addresses. It will provide an opportunity for CU Denver to enhance its reputation as an institution committed to understanding and solving complex problems through academic and applied research. The multi-disciplinary research team, scale and substance of the research, and variety of deliverables all advance CU Denver’s mission to create change in the communities around us while tackling one of the most salient and pressing problems facing America today.

The world’s semi-arid cities are at the intersection of rising temperatures, water scarcity, and rapid urban growth. As extreme heat events and drought intensify, these urban regions face increasing challenges to simultaneously conserve water, mitigate urban heat, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Actions that address one goal often influence others: for example, irrigation can cool local microclimates and promote carbon storage in plants and soils, yet it draws on scarce water resources. Despite these interconnections, urban environmental research has largely treated heat, water, and carbon as separate problems. Understanding how these processes interact across landscapes and scales is essential to designing cities that are both sustainable and resilient.

This project will advance understanding of how urban design influences the interconnected dynamics of water, heat, and carbon by identifying landscape characteristics that enhance cooling and carbon storage efficiency while using less water. We hypothesize that specific urban landscape configurations can mitigate climate hazards by reducing heat and increasing carbon storage with lower water inputs. This central hypothesis will be tested and refined through field data collection and analysis that builds upon a robust urban climate dataset collected by the PIs as part of CU Denver’s nationally recognized research efforts on urban heat and vegetation. We propose to expand this existing scope of work to include soil moisture, carbon fluxes, and hydrologic processes; key linkages that interact to determine how urban landscapes absorb, store, and release heat and greenhouse gases. Soils, in particular, play a pivotal role: they regulate both water and carbon storage, linking below-ground processes to above-ground hazards such as heat stress, and we will include soil characteristics in our investigation. By explicitly quantifying these connections, our team will identify the tradeoffs and co-benefits among cooling, water use, and carbon sequestration.

Furthermore, this project also represents a strategic step toward a broader institutional vision: the aspirational Urban Climate Observatory for Resilience and Engagement (Urban CORE) initiative at CU Denver. Once established, Urban CORE will serve as a collaborative to unite researchers across disciplines to connect the physical dynamics of urban climate hazards (e.g. extreme heat, air pollution, floods) with the social and policy systems that shape resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation. By combining physical and social science approaches with community engagement, Urban CORE will link the science of urban climate hazard dynamics with evidence-based planning and policy. Over time, we envision this collaborative will grow into a durable, interdisciplinary hub for understanding and mitigating interconnected urban climate hazards. This will advance knowledge and practice for cities facing an increasingly complex climate future and position CU Denver as a national and international leader in urban climate hazard and resilience research.

Stress-related disorders such as anxiety, depression, and addiction are the most common mental health conditions worldwide, affecting millions and carrying an enormous economic burden. These brain disorders are challenging to treat, with low rates of long-term remission, underscoring the need for new strategies that can prevent the development of stress-related disorders by enabling stress resistance.

Stress disrupts key serotonin and dopamine pathways in the brain. In particular, hyperactivation of serotonin neurons during stress can heighten anxiety and blunt dopamine function, creating vulnerability to mood disorders and addictions. Prophylactic interventions that stabilize these neurochemical systems can enhance stress resistance and reduce the likelihood of developing anxiety, depression, or addiction. In comparison to managing mental illness after it develops, preventing it from developing reduces reliance on costly healthcare services, enhances workforce productivity, and yields broad public health benefits.

Psilocybin, the active compound in “magic mushrooms,” directly activates serotonin receptors, leading to lasting alterations in both serotonergic and indirectly connected dopaminergic pathways. After mental illness develops, psilocybin has shown promising mood-enhancing and anti-addictive effects in clinical trials; however, placebo effects and participant expectancy may partially confound these results. And significantly, it remains unknown whether administering psilocybin before stress exposure can promote resilience and reduce the risk of developing mental illness.

We aim to harness our existing expertise in stress, drug addiction models, and the clinical use of psychedelics to test the hypothesis that psilocybin enables stress resistance. We propose using rodent models, which circumvent the problems inherent to human trials and permit mechanistic interrogation of the neural circuits involved. We envision building on these foundational studies by pursuing major NIH grants and private donations through the new CU Denver Center for Psychedelic Research (CPR), ultimately expanding CPR’s scope to preclinical studies and strengthening its reputation as a leader in psychedelic research.

Preliminary data supporting the conceptual and technical feasibility of our proposed research is required for successful external grants. Similarly, publications generate momentum and excitement that are attractive to donors. Therefore, we seek ORS funding to pursue the following specific aims, the completion of which will generate critical preliminary data, produce peer reviewed publications that advance knowledge relevant to public health, expand the mission of CPR, and enhance the competitiveness of subsequent grant applications.

Our vision is to create a self-sustaining, enduring center of excellence in computational molecular science that is recognized globally for innovation in research, creativity in education, successful workforce development, and having a large societal impact. The objectives to do this are: (i) Create and nurture research teams with complementary, forward-thinking, expertise needed to expand the current scope of research topics, students and funding. (ii) Seek collaborations with experimentalists where long-term research efforts are mutually beneficial. These collaborators will come internally from within the department and the school, from other schools withing the university, and nationally/globally. We shall create a quasi-virtual collaboratorium where no costly computing facilities need be maintained on campus, global collaborations could be leveraged for attracting superior talent, and a broad reach of societal impact can be attained. (iii) Create a center of excellence, having a director and advisory board, with its own branding and website within the department to elevate CU Denver’s reputation nationally and globally.

Organizational activities to support this include: (i) Supporting new collaborative projects among researchers in the Center, in the department, and outside the department to apply for joint research grants to agencies and foundations we had not yet considered; (ii) Providing small research funds (up to $4k/person) to support the members to travel to meetings with program officers or directors and external collaborators and partners for research and proposal developments, to offset publication costs, and to subscribe to database and/or AI platforms; (iii) Offering small summer support (up to $16k/person) to the members for generating preliminary data and/or writing multi-PI proposals; (iv) Overseeing a curriculum reform in Computational Chemistry to better align with Center needs and national/international departmental initiatives; (v) Organizing community events (at least one per year) in the form of seminars, workshops, summer schools, and/or short teaching sessions. Guest lecturers who provide new perspectives to tackle specific issues will be invited. (vi) Promote industrial partnerships and technology transfer and licensing of department intellectual properties and through industry personnel exchanges; (vii) Coordinating reports on the activities, progress, and expenditure to the CU-Denver Office of Research Services, providing copy editing services for proposals/papers and other such needs, among other services.

Neurological and mental health disorders such as dementia and depression are very common and represent a huge economic and public health burden. Despite decades of searching for new cures for these diseases, new treatments are few and far between and full recovery is uncommon. Maternal physical activity during pregnancy can confer benefits on the brain functions of the adult offspring, including enhanced capacity for synaptic plasticity, improved learning and memory, and protection against mental health disorders. How maternal exercise benefits offspring brain health is an entirely unexplored research area and an untapped avenue to new treatments.

Epigenetic alterations are a clear mechanism by which maternal exercise can shape brain health of offspring. Epigenetics refers to reversible chemical modifications to DNA, RNA, or histone proteins which play a central role in the regulation of gene expression. Exercise stimulates the release of numerous cell signaling molecules from various tissues such as muscle, fat, immune cells, etc.; these are collectively referred to as exerkines. Some exerkines cross the blood placental barrier and could influence fetal development by producing long-lasting epigenetic changes to the fetal genome.

An interdisciplinary team consisting of Drs. Phiel (epigenetics), Greenwood (neuroscience and exercise), and Ragland (bioinformatics) propose to use maternal exercise as a model to begin to explore how changes in the environment can shape the developing epigenome to produce transgenerational effects on the brain. We hypothesize that maternal exercise produces epigenetic changes in the brains of offspring which persist through adulthood. The following specific aims test this hypothesis using advanced technologies to identify various epigenetic changes across multiple brain regions in adult offspring of pregnant rats that exercised:

Aim 1. Determine if maternal exercise results in changes in the epigenetic, m6A modification of specific mRNAs by performing m6A-seq. Here, we will determine if maternal exercise during pregnancy changes the m6A modification of specific mRNAs in the brains of adult offspring.

Aim 2. Determine if maternal exercise results in changes in chromatin accessibility by performing ATAC-seq. Here, we will determine if maternal exercise during pregnancy changes the chromatin accessibility, a result of several possible epigenetic modifications, as measured by ATAC-seq.

This is a new direction of research that requires the unique expertise of each team member. We envision using the data obtained here as foundational data for large external grant applications. The NIH is interested in epigenetic research, and there are several active notices of special interests related to epigenetics. A joint venture between 
NSF Integrated Organismal Systems and NIH National Human Genome Research Institute supports research mapping genotype and the epigenome to disease states and other traits, and there is a current call for applications in this specific area. Several UCD investigators conduct research relevant to epigenetics, presenting opportunities for future collaboration. This collective interest—evidenced by the nine faculty involved in the previous Grand Challenges epigenetics project—could contribute to the formation of a center of excellence in Applied Epigenetic Research at CU Denver.

There is evidence that young children’s challenging behavior has worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbating already stressed families (Hanno et al., 2022). An effective system of care is needed to identify young children with early behavioral challenges and link them and their families to early intervention (Wakschlag et al., 2019). When young children and their families are connected to services and support, they are more likely to experience positive outcomes, including amelioration of behavioral issues and improvements in secondary concerns, such as the parent-child relationship (Catania et al., 2011). Yet, numerous barriers negatively impact early intervention, including limited access to providers and stigma around seeking help (Balachandran & Bhuvaneswari, 2025). Family-friendly and easily accessible resources are needed to complement the paucity of existing community and web-based sources of information and support for families. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in behavioral healthcare has the potential to increase access, enhance early detection, and offer nonjudgemental support (Olawade et al., 2024). The use of AI to support families with young children with behavioral concerns is an underexplored utilization of AI.

This research initiative seeks to extend our research team’s prior collaborative efforts in the area of early childhood intervention by developing an AI model to provide responsive and individualized support to families of young children who have concerns about their children’s behavior. Co-PIs Dr. Elizabeth Steed (Professor, Early Childhood Education, SEHD) and Dr. Rachel Stein (Assistant Professor, School Psychology, SEHD) will lead the research team. Dr. Nancy Leech (Professor, Research and Evaluation Methods, SEHD) will provide methodological consultation. Dr. Farnoush Banaei-Kashani (Associate Professor, Computer Science, CEDC) will provide advising for the AI model that a computer science student, Mr. Elyas Larfi will develop. After building the AI model, we will conduct a randomized control trial to evaluate 100 families' perceptions of AI and experiences using the AI protopye.

We will utilize the findings from this pilot to pursue extramural funding to develop a more robust and scalable AI model and eventually establish a center of excellence on the use of AI in early childhood intervention. There are currently possibilities for external funding around AI development in education, including funding from the U.S. Department of Education and the Vision Grant Program for the Spencer Initiative on AI in Education. We plan to use external funding as the primary funding source for the center focused on AI in early childhood intervention. The center will bring together early childhood intervention and computer science researchers and stakeholders such as family members, educators, and clinicians to plan, build, and pilot practice-based applications of AI in early childhood intervention and study their use. There is no such center at this time focused on leveraging modern technology to support children, families, and early childhood intervention personnel.