Seed Grant Awards Description
Open/All Discipline Seed Grant (Fall 2023)
Nearly 17 million people worldwide have a first stroke each year (Feigin et al. 2014). Up to 80% of stroke survivors experience upper extremity impairments such as spasticity, weakness, abnormal muscle activity patterns, and limited tactile perception and range of motion (Dobkin & Dorsch 2011). Impairment of the upper extremity is often chronic and a cause of long-term disability (Ward 2017). Stroke survivors view the recovery of their upper extremity as a priority to improve their quality of life (Au-Yeung & Hui-Chan 2009). We propose to develop a noninvasive vibrotactile stimulation therapy with wearable technology for upper extremity stroke rehabilitation. Vibrotactile stimulation is a mechanical vibratory input produced with small motors on the skin that create a sensation similar to a phone gently vibrating. We have designed a shirt that has 14 vibrating motors incorporated on the sleeve (on the side of the impacted limb) and a glove that has 5 vibrating motors on the fingertips. We will conduct a randomized control trial to compare the efficacy of the therapy (vibrotactile stimulation in addition to conventional therapy) and a control group (conventional therapy only). We will have 24 patients recruited within 1-week post-stroke be randomized 1:1 to each group. In the therapy group, patients will receive 3 hours of stimulation with the shirt and 2 hours of stimulation with the glove per day (7 days per week) during their stay in the inpatient rehabilitation unit (on average, between 2-3 weeks). The primary outcome measure is the Upper Extremity Fugl-Meyer Assessment conducted at baseline and at discharge from the inpatient rehabilitation unit. Our secondary outcome measures include the Modified Ashworth Scale and measurements of upper extremity kinematics. We hypothesize that the therapy group will have greater improvements in upper extremity kinematics, spasticity, tactile perception and range of motion compared to the control group at discharge from the rehabilitation unit. Given the evidence that repeated upper extremity muscle vibration can significantly improve motor function and spasticity in stroke patients in laboratory and clinical settings (Annino et al. 2019, Calabro et al. 2017, Marconi et al. 2011, Noma et al. 2009), a wearable device has the potential to increase the duration and length of the therapy, which seems critical to improve recovery (Hayward et al. 2021). This will be the first study to investigate the effects of vibrotactile stimulation in the upper extremity with a wearable device. Furthermore, given that post-stroke spasticity is common on the muscles of the upper and lower arm (Thibaut et al. 2013), our device has the potential to yield further improvements than a stimulation limited on the knuckles (Seim et al. 2021). The cost of the wearable device (approximately $80) could allow the widespread adoption of the therapy.
This proposal seeks support for development of an interactive website, E.A.R.T.H. Lit (Eco-literacies for Accountability and Responsibility Together with Heart; www.earthlit.org), with a dual focus on advancing environmental justice literacy learning in elementary education and serving as a dynamic data collection platform. Working with my Co-PI (non-UC Denver faculty), we aim to empower educators to teach and advocate for environmental justice.
This project brings together an interdisciplinary team of faculty and student researchers who aim to investigate the impact of the recent trend toward decriminalization and legalization of psychedelic drugs across different geographic regions in our country on the use of these substances and their associated outcomes. Ultimately, this project will examine how drug use and subsequent mental health and labor market outcomes differ across those regions in the aftermath of these laws. In the preliminary work to be funded by the ORS Seed Grant program, these researchers will use the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), collected annually by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), as the primary data source for this analysis. In addition to detailed individual sociodemographic information the NSDUH provides information about psychedelic use in general and psilocybin use in particular. Access to geographic data necessary for this analysis is available through application to a Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC). This interdisciplinary project applies econometric methodologies including Difference-in-Differences and Two-way Fixed Effects models to compare usage patterns and links with outcomes in regions that have relaxed penalties for psychedelic drug usage with those that have not. The analysis will also include synthetic control group methods with case studies to address any methodological concerns about balance between treatment and control groups. We draw upon our team’s criminal justice and public policy expertise to explore the relationship between legislative changes and their impacts on the links between psychedelic drug usage that may have therapeutic benefits on the one hand, and criminal behavior of illicit drug use on the other. By funding necessary expenses associated with gaining access to confidential data through the FSRDC that allows researchers to access the geographic location of survey respondents, seed grant funding from ORS will allow the research team, in collaboration with student researchers, to extract initial data and gather evidence of current psychedelic usage patterns across regions, assess how prelegalization patterns differ across regions linked to decriminalization, and to design statistical models to measure the impacts legislation on usage and subsequent outcomes. The findings will be used to inform future research projects examining the impact of psychedelic drug usage on mental health and labor market outcomes, including plans to seek external funding through an R03 application to the National Institutes of Health through the National Institute of Mental Health and/or the National Institute of Drug Abuse These activities will greatly improve a subsequent grant application by providing evidence that the proposed analysis strategy will be successful at understanding the impact of decriminalization legislation.
The development of floating wind turbines has recently been designated a matter of national importance by the Biden-Harris Administration in an effort to establish the United States as a global leader in offshore renewable energy. Due to their location within harsh marine environments, it is paramount that an accurate understanding of their structural and hydrodynamics is obtained via the use of numerical modeling. Yet, current modeling methodologies are largely based on linear wave theories which assume that the superstructure experiences only rigid body motion and are subject exclusively to nonbreaking waves. While this simplification significantly reduces the time and cost of analysis, it ultimately presents an incomplete understanding of the underlying physics governing the dynamics of floating structures. The overarching objective of this project is to elucidate the dynamic response of floating wind turbines under breaking wave impact while explicitly accounting for its structural flexibility (i.e., natural period of vibration). Wave breaking is a highly nonlinear phenomenon which impart impulsive loads that can significantly amplify the dynamic accelerations and forces attracted by the superstructure. To reveal its effects, advanced numerical methods constituting nonlinear finite element modeling (FEM) and Lagrangian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) will be adopted to respectively capture the structural and hydrodynamics associated with breaking wave impact upon a floating wind turbine. Following validation of the numerical scheme against experimental data in the literature, the SPH-FEM method will be implemented to simulate the 3D dynamics of the semisubmersible DeepCwind-OC4 floating wind turbine developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Dynamic forces, accelerations, and vibrations of the turbine tower and blades will be ascertained under breaking wave conditions. This will enable comparisons against equivalent linear models commonly used for design to quantify the nonlinear dynamic effects unable to be captured when assuming rigid body motion and nonbreaking waves. Ultimately, this project aims to address the importance of accurately capturing the nonlinear dynamics of floating wind turbines to improve their efficiency, resiliency, economy, durability, and safety within US waters.
The purpose of this application is to request funding for the first phase of The Racial and Ethnic Socialization Lab. The first phase includes collecting data to obtain insight into the intergenerational processes of racial/ethnic socialization (RES) messages that monoracial/monoethnic Black/African Americans, Hispanic, and/or Latine/x parents (henceforth referred to as participants) receive from their families of origin and provide to their children. Racial/ethnic socialization can be operationalized as bidirectional communication between parents of color and their children that prepares children for the bias they will encounter and instills cultural pride (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Hughes et al., 2006). Such communication can act as a buffer for negative outcomes related to race-based traumatic stress (e.g., higher rates of depression, anxiety; Bannon et al., 2009; Davis & Stevenson, 2006). Current sociopolitical events (e.g., “stop woke” policies, attacks on DEI initiatives, removal of affirmative action protections) may be creating unique circumstances whereby subsequent generations must navigate racial/ethnic discrimination with fewer safety nets than their predecessors, thus potentially leading parents to adjust RES messages. To the best of our knowledge, no study has examined how and if RES messages change across time and generations. This existing gap in the literature along with recent historical events, represents a unique data collection time point.
Arts and Humanities Seed Grant (Spring 2023)
A feature-length documentary narrating the life of several Cubans who settled in Colorado in different time periods. The film explores the convergence of Cuban and Western American cultures. The piece examines the struggles, opportunities, and obstacles the Cuban diaspora has gone through while living in the United States, what they left behind, the concept of home, their interpersonal relationships, and their contributions to American society.
On November 19th, 2023, a lone gunman entered Club Q, an LGBTQ night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and opened fire with an assault rifle. The gunman killed five people before being tackled to the ground, disarmed, and beaten into submission by Richard (Rich) Fierro, an Army Combat Veteran. Rich was at Club Q attending a drag show with his wife, daughter and his daughter’s boyfriend, Raymond Green Vance. Tragically, Raymond would not survive the night. Rich was well known in the Colorado Springs community as the co-owner of Atrevida Beer Co., a self-described Latina Forward brewery with the motto Diversity, It’s on Tap.
The half-hour documentary Fierro = Steel, the first in a triptych of documentary films exploring violence in American culture, tells Rich’s story. It asks the question, what sort of person runs toward the gun fire? Fierro’s bold insights on diversity, courage, and unity remind us of what it takes to keep America a beacon of hope for all.
Adjacent to CU Denver’s campus, the old Chinatown in Denver was a residential and business district between Wazee and Market streets and from 15th street to 20th street. Due to historical moments of racial discrimination, social injustice, and political unrest, the old Chinatown, once considered the largest in the interior West, was demolished by the 1940s and is nowadays rarely known by the public. To promote public awareness and engagement with the hidden history, the proposed grant will be deployed to establish a research unit, Chinatown Initiative, focusing on the spatial research and potential urban redevelopment of Denver’s Chinatown. In collaboration with enterprises, institutions, and organizations, such as Colorado Asian Pacific United Organization and Denver Agency for Human Rights & Community Partnerships, the grant will lay out the foundation for future research activities that draw in external resources and fundings to unfold forces between social justice, environmental concern, and community displacement, promoting a sustainable model of urban redevelopment in Denver’s Chinatown.
Picaresque narratives tell the story of a rogue figure who travels widely across a territory, surviving by their wits as they discover worldly brutality and corruption. In my book manuscript, Rogues in Combat: Picaresque Narrative and the Genres of War, 1668-2020, I examine the global migration of the picaresque as a form for interpreting the space of war. I argue that across time, language, and medium, picaresque writing has served the purpose of disclosing and popularizing a hidden war history. In the era of nation-states, wars involve the suppression and distortion of crucial information, leaving behind a highly compromised historical record. Chronicles, news, memoirs, and textbooks tend to reinforce the inadequacy of the record by focusing primarily on the elite experience of officers and statesmen, and by avoiding atrocity, war crimes, cowardice, and betrayal. Picaresque war narratives offer the corrective of a counterhistory. They reveal an untold story of war, a history of events that has been covered up by state rhetoric and national biases.
Open/All Discipline Seed Grant (Spring 2023)
This proposed project aims to elucidate the physics of the precipitation icing process on a flow-induced vibrating circular cylinder under a turbulent flow and to explore how these flow-induced vibrations (FIV) interact with the dynamic icing process and affect the structural loading and fatigue on the cylinder. This fundamental problem plays a key role in bridges, wind turbines, and offshore structures, with specific relevance to the scenario of failure of overhead power (or transmission) lines under extreme icing events (e.g., a major power crisis that affected Quebec in January 1998 and Texas in February 2021 during several extreme winter storms). Such a catastrophic failure of transmission lines suggests a need for a deeper understanding of the underlying physics of the problem (viz., combined, perhaps synergistic, effects of vibration and icing of transmission lines). As such, clarifying the importance of fluid-structure interactions under a changing geometry and roughness has the potential to produce long-term outcomes for significant advancements in predicting the lifespan and in conducting early pinpoint detection and maintenance of power transmission lines subject to the simultaneous effects of vibration and icing.
We propose to perform high impact research in modeling the ionosphere using deep learning techniques by combining the expertise of Dr. Mark Golkowski in electrical engineering, Dr. Ashis Biswas in Computer Science, and Ms. Srivani Inturi, who is a MS student in Computer Science. We have a novel approach. The novelty of our approach is to model both the lower and upper ionosphere using two different datasets and to also employ Deep Learning (DL) models. Figure 1 shows the ionospheric electron density profile vs. altitude. We will use observations of Very Low Frequency (VLF) waves to obtain information on the lower ionosphere (80 km – 100 km) and Total Electron Content (TEC) measurements for the higher altitudes. We intend to forecast the lower ionospheric behavior by using the ground-based VLF/LF data available in the Waldo database and the forecasting of the upper ionosphere by using the Global Ionospheric Maps (GIM) data, GIM data uses more than 200 receivers over the entire world providing TEC data. Ultimately, we will collect a large amount of input data over multiple seasons, years, and a complete solar cycle. This huge dataset along with appropriate influencing parameters will enable the deep-learning model to capture the variations and patterns within the ionosphere to forecast accurately at least a day ahead.
Biologists predict that global warming will pressure animals to move to cooler habitats at higher elevations. Although moving upslope can reduce the risk of overheating, high altitudes will present species with a suite of new threats to overcome, especially low oxygen (O2) availability. Consequently, to shift upslope and avoid the worst impacts of climate change, animals will need to possess or produce traits that buffer them against hypoxia. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few mammals and birds, we know surprisingly little about if or how most terrestrial animals overcome low O2 in the present —much less what strategies they might employ in the future. Thus, to understand if upslope dispersal is even a plausible response to climate change, we need insight into the mechanisms of hypoxia tolerance among terrestrial animals.
The volcanic sediments at Laetoli in northern Tanzania, preserve a plethora of fossilized fauna remains and animal trackways that provide evidence on human origins in eastern Africa 3.56 million years ago. Of particular interests are pre-human (hominin) remains and footprints assigned to Australopithecus afarensis that have been recovered at Localities 7 and 8 (including the hominin footprint trails at Laetoli). I am requesting support for our renewed and expanded paleoanthropological research at Laetoli in northern Tanzania that seeks to: (a) systematically recover additional hominin remains at three Localities that will allows us to establish the taxonomic status of two nearly complete mandibles recovered from Locality 7SW at Laetoli, (b) carry out a ground penetrating radar (GPR) probes to virtually recover additional hominin footprints that will allow us to establish whether more than one species of Australopithecus left their prints at Laetoli 3.56 million years ago, and (c) to use the data collected to develop a multi-years grant proposal to NSF (Biological Anthropology Program: Senior Research Awards BA-SR) and the National Geographic Society (Human Histories and Culture – Level II) grant.
Maternal health research has extensively documented soberingly high rates of morbidity and mortality among Black women and high rates of poor provider experiences for Black and Hispanic women in the US; racism has been found to be key driver of these disparities. Yet less is known of the maternal health experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US. Limited studies reveal significant variation in maternal health outcomes among AAPI individuals, with those of Chinese and Japanese descent more likely to experience obstetric trauma during vaginal deliveries and those of Filipino and Pacific Islander descent more likely to experience c-sections. Even with higher SES, greater likelihood of being privately insured, and living in wealthier neighborhoods compared to Whites, AAPI individuals experience worse maternal health outcomes, including higher rates of postpartum hemorrhage, severe vaginal tearing, need for mechanical ventilation, and mortality. This gap in the literature along with these disparate trends motivate my project: a multi-sited ethnographic study that examines the impact of race and racism on AAPI women/birthing individuals during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum.
In 2006, a biological treatment facility was installed [4] at the Lowry Superfund Site. What makes this facility unique is its use of naturally occurring microorganisms found in the contaminated water itself. The treatment involves pumping groundwater to surface tanks supplied with oxygen and phosphorous. Supplemented with suspended plastic supports to increase surface area, microorganisms in situ to the water attach to the supports in layers called biofilms. The biofilms are thought to be the primary site of microbial degradation of the 1,4-dioxane. Successfully removing up to 92% of the 1,4-dioxane, thus meeting regulatory standards, the plant is now faced with fluctuating 1,4-dioxane levels and increased regulatory removal requirements. These challenges require a better understanding of the microbiology happening in the bioreactors and a determination of whether the microorganisms can remove lower levels of the 1,4-dioxane [5,6] (note, the new requirement is not yet released). The goal of this study is to isolate 1,4-dioxane degrading microorganisms and describe their abilities to degrade 1,4-dioxane.
BURRO aims to tackle the issue of forest fire soil destabilization with an innovative solution that hands control back to nature through an array of biodegradable retaining pods seeded with tree saplings. The pods are individually driven into post-fire sloped landscapes and then interconnected to produce a distributed, robust, but flexible biodegradable retaining wall. Each pod collects, stores, and distributes water to a sapling tree inside to support its growth on a nutrient-deprived burn site. Over time, the sapling tree matures, emerging from the pod both above and below ground, and resulting in the decay and eventual consumption of the pod. New tree roots assume control of soil stability from the decayed and consumed pod.
The overarching objective of this proposal is to address the susceptibility of UAV communications to advanced traffic analysis attacks. Our defensive approach relies on perturbing the patterns of these communications based on a deep learning concept called adversarial example (AE) in order to obfuscate the patterns of the UAV traffic strategically and indistinguishably. Adversarial example methods exploit the susceptibility of deep learning models to input manipulation attacks, where small, carefully-tuned changes to the inputs can dramatically alter the deep learning models’ outputs. An adversarial example, in our scope, is a well-designed small perturbation that is incorporated into communications in the UAV ecosystem to obfuscate the identifying patterns of these communications, thus defeating adversarial traffic analysis attacks. We will explore the efficacy of existing AE methods (e.g., FGSM, DeepFool, PGD) and various perturbation strategies (e.g., adding fake packets, manipulating real packets’ size and timing, route randomization) against these protocols. Preliminary development of this defensive method (based on PGD) reduced the accuracy of traffic analysis in the mentioned UAV ecosystem from 97.8% to 47.2%, therefore manifesting the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed method.
Research on nonprofit resilience has grown rapidly over the last few years, and especially since the pandemic began. Yet, most research studies are qualitative studies with small sample sizes and were conducted at a single time point and with a few subsectors of nonprofits. The results of these studies have laid the groundwork for researchers to begin understanding nonprofit resilience, but a larger scale of research utilizing a more representative sample and tracking nonprofits over time is needed.
Therefore, this proposed research has two aims. The first aim responds to the call for the “'grand challenge' of studying the role and functioning of organizations during adverse natural or social events" (e.g., van der Vegt et al., 2015). The objective is to examine the resilience of Colorado nonprofits in the post-pandemic era by answering these two overarching questions: 1) what tactics and strategies did Colorado nonprofits adopt in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and what are the impacts of these strategies on nonprofit resilience? 2) what are the organizational and leadership factors that enabled some nonprofits to be more resilient than others?
In order to achieve the first aim, the second aim is to set up a data infrastructure: the Colorado Nonprofit Research Panel, a survey panel that will recruit nonprofit executives to participate in survey 2 questionnaires. The proposed research will use this Research Panel to track participating nonprofits for at least two years post-pandemic. After the grant is completed, the research panel will be maintained for continuing research.
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