Universities across Pennsylvania are the beneficiaries of a new grant program by The Charles E. Kaufman Foundation, part of The Pittsburgh Foundation. Eight grants totaling almost $1.6 million were awarded to support cutting-edge scientific research at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University and Philadelphia’s Drexel and Temple universities.
The new, annual grantmaking program, which becomes one of the major resources for scientific research in Pennsylvania, was made possible through the biggest bequest to The Pittsburgh Foundation in its 68-year history to support new research initiatives at Pennsylvania institutions of higher learning in chemistry, biology and physics.
“These grants come at a critical time due to the constrained funding environment throughout the United States for scientific research programs,” said Dr. Graham Hatfull, chair of the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board and a University of Pittsburgh biotechnology professor.
In the “New Investigator” category, grants of $150,000 over two years were awarded to:
- Joel McManus, Department of Biological Sciences, Carnegie Mellon for research on “High-Throughput Probing of Human IncRNA Structure.”
- Aditya S. Khair, Department of Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon for research on “Charges, Forces and Particles in Ionic Liquids.”
- Michelle Dolinski, Department of Physics, Drexel for research on “Solid Xenon Bolometers for Radiation Detection.”
- Sheereen Majd, Department of Bioengineering, Penn State for research on “Functional Studies of Multidrug Resistance Transporters at Single-Protein Level.”
- William M. Wuest, Department of Chemistry, Temple for research on “The Development of Chemical Probes to Study Nucleoside Signaling in Bacterial Biofilms.”
Two-year “New Initiative” research grants were awarded to:
- Sergey M. Frolov and W. Vincent Liu, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh, $242,310 for research on “Topological Quantum Wire Emulators.”
- Veronica Hinman and Jonathan Minden, Department of Biological Sciences; Bruce Alan Armitage and Danith H. Ly, Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon, $300,000 for research on “Developing a Sea Star Model for Regenerative Biology.”
- Christine D. Keating, Chemistry and Theresa Mayer, Electrical Engineering & Materials Science & Engineering, Penn State, $300,000 for research on “Probing the Role of Interparticle Forces in the Collective Behavior of Particle Assemblies.”
Source: The Pittsburgh Foundation
Writer: Elise Vider