Three ISR faculty receive UMD Brain and Behavior Initiative seed grants

Three research teams with ISR faculty members were chosen for funding by the University of Maryland’s Brain and Behavior Initiative (BBI) in its FY18 seed grant program.

Through its seed grant program, the BBI successfully promotes collaborations among faculty from research areas that are traditionally exclusive. A successful seed grant competition fosters new research projects undertaken by faculty who have never worked together before as interdisciplinary teams. These collaborations are truly interdisciplinary.

For this round of seed grants, BBI received 14 proposals from 41 principal investigators (PIs) representing five colleges (BSOS, ENGR, CMNS, EDUC, and ARHU) and 15 departments. Twenty-five of the PIs were applying for BBI seed grant funding for the first time.

The committee chose the seven highest-ranked proposals for funding, including three projects with ISR faculty:

A Multimodal Sensor Discovery Platform to Study the Molecular Events Underlying the Gut-Microbiome-Brain Axis
Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR), William Bentley (BIOE), Jens Herberholz (Psychology/NACS)

Precision Optogenetics: msec time resolution optical imaging and control of neuronal circuits
Behtash Babadi (ECE; ISR affiliation), Wolfgang Losert (Physics)

Central Nervous System Processing of Learned Vocal Communication Signals
William Idsardi (Linguistics/NACS), Jonathan Fritz (ISR), Robert Dooling (Psychology/NACS)

Published May 3, 2018