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Launched in 2018, the Research Seed Grant Program provides funding to catalyze and support SUNY faculty in the pursuit of extramural grants in strategic priority and other frontier areas. Awards are provided annually through a competitive RFP process under multiple tracks including large center scale planning and development grants, multidisciplinary small team awards, and NIH proposal resubmission support awards. A new COVID seed grant program was launched in 2020.
Nationally funded research centers provide considerable resources in support of broad, interdisciplinary research. They promote enduring partnerships, advance science, technology, and the economy, and bring significant prestige to the hosting institutions. The SUNY Center-Scale Proposal Planning and Development Grant awards help multidisciplinary faculty teams with a clear vision and deep expertise to develop competitive center-scale proposals in priority research areas, with the goal to increase the number of interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research centers at SUNY campuses.
Today’s pressing societal challenges require innovative approaches that bring together experts from diverse scientific, engineering, and humanity domains. They call for expert teams to collaborate with a shared purpose, integrating individual knowledge, theories, data, and research methodologies in the pursuit of impactful solutions. SUNY Multidisciplinary Small Team awards promote team science by supporting interdisciplinary faculty teams from across schools and campuses in the development of highly competitive extramural funding proposals in priority research areas.
With increasingly selective award processes, competitive grant proposals often have to be submitted several times before they are funded. Persistence is key to success. The SUNY Resubmission grant is designed to help in this challenging process, and supports PIs who have received highly favorable ratings on prior unfunded grant proposals. The first award round focused on National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant resubmission; other funding agencies and programs may be considered for future RFPs.
SUNY is at the forefront of national efforts to combat COVID-19. The SUNY COVID-19 Research Seed Grant Program was launched in March 2020 to support faculty in responding expeditiously to solicitations from external funding agencies on research proposals related to the novel coronavirus.
Since the launch of the program in 2018, SUNY Research Seed Grant awardees have secured over $42M in external funding, winning highly competitive awards from multiple funding sources including the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Some of our success stories are presented below.
Awards support the development of competitive proposals for new centers and expansion of existing centers.
Awards support the resubmission of NIH proposals that received highly favorable ratings on prior unfunded grant proposals.
Awards support the development of competitive proposals related to the novel coronavirus
Among the four pillars of quantum technology—quantum computing, communication, sensing, and simulation—quantum communication offers the clearest path toward integration with current information technology. Multiple Stony Brook faculty members and their teams are spearheading research efforts and combining their expertise and core research activities in three major areas: (I) computer engineering and networking, (II) quantum communication, and (III) scaling of quantum devices to create the quantum technology of the future. Our Center will accelerate the development of quantum technologies to facilitate the growth of these important topics within the academic and industrial Long Island community, paving the way for a large federally funded national-level Quantum Center in New York. In order to create the necessary interdisciplinary atmosphere, the Center will bring together important groups of scientists working on the quantum sciences on several academic, national laboratories and industrial campuses in New York and beyond.
Professors Korepin, Figueroa, Schneble, and Wei Receive Funding to Develop a Proposal for a SUNY Quantum Information Science Center at Long Island
Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory Host Quantum Information Science Workshop
Low cost access to space has never been in more demand. The high rates of launch costs are primarily due to the complexity of existing liquid propulsion systems which cause an increase in mass and handling of toxic materials. The focus of the center will be on exploring the use of hybrid rocket motors using high regression rate fuels that are safe and low cost but are not well understood. The objective is to gain new understanding of hybrid rocket motors through high fidelity numerical simulation using exascale computing and machine learning driven data reduction techniques. The long term potential impact of the research is to lower launch costs, leading to accelerated exploration of space.
UB awarded $8.5 million to improve ‘hybrid’ space rockets
The Seed Grant was awarded to facilitate the establishment of the Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics (CNCD), an initiative aimed at facilitating collaborative efforts across research groups with expertise in different aspects of systems and theoretical/computational neuroscience. CNCD brings together researchers developing and applying cutting edge approaches to further our understanding of brain functions such as sensory perception, learning, decision-making and age-dependent changes in cognition. Thanks to the Seed Grant Program, CNCD was established and the six founding members obtained preliminary data that facilitated the development of an application for an U01 NIH BRAIN initiative Center Grant Proposal that was successfully awarded to the burgeoning center.
Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics Receives NIH BRAIN Initiative Grant
Rapid and accurate testing for COVID-19 is an essential component of our response to this worldwide pandemic. The Cady Research Group has collaborated with Ciencia, Inc. (E. Hartford, CT) and researchers at the Wadsworth Center (NY State Department of Health) to develop an antibody test for COVID-19 infections using traditional blood samples, as well as dried blood samples that require only a small droplet of blood. Our 30 minute test is highly accurate and provides information about a person’s prior infection status and immune response to multiple facets of the COVID-19 virus.
SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Ciencia, Inc., NYS Department of Health, Wadsworth Center Announce 30-Minute COVID-19 Antibody Test
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are so named due to the similarity of their appearance to a crown, with small protrusions of “spike” proteins covering their surface that are used by the virus as molecular keys to unlock entry into and infect a host cell. Spike proteins are the essential component of vaccines currently under development, but the resulting antibodies recognize the spike in surface exposed areas that are highly variable between different coronaviruses. In contrast, the core of the spike involved in membrane fusion is highly conserved among coronaviruses, and we hypothesize that small molecule drugs could bind there and prevent the virus from unlocking entry into cells. A major challenge is that our knowledge of how the spike unlocks entry is too limited to be able to design such drugs. We are bridging this gap with computer models, and hope to gain knowledge that could lead to broadly effective treatments for COVID-19, as well as future pandemics caused by as-yet unknown coronaviruses.
Researchers Working on Computational Models to Design Ways to Treat COVID-19
There is an urgent need for broad-spectrum agents that can inhibit SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. Interferons are cytokines that provide a first-line of defense against viral infections. Interferon-lambda is a distinct class that does not cause inflammation, and thereby represents a promising anti-COVID-19 therapeutic. We aim to determine the protective effects of Interferon-lambda (IFN-L) against SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro (short-term) and in vivo (longer-term). We have engineered cultured human lung airway cells to express the SARS-CoV-2 ACE2 receptor and used these cells for in vitro virus replication assays +/– IFN-L. These experiments are conducted under BSL3 biocontainment. We have initiated experiments using a preclinical human ACE2 transgenic mouse model to examine the inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 replication by IFN-L in vivo. We anticipate these results will provide important preclinical data to support using IFN-L as an anti-COVID-19 therapeutic in a clinical setting.
Stony Brook Team to Test Effectiveness of Inhibitor Drugs on COVID-19
Advanced Biomanufacturing is a new and emerging science and engineering discipline that studies the use of biological systems or products of biological systems to manufacture new therapeutic and diagnostic agents, biomaterials, biomedical devices, and engineered tissues/organs at high volume and in a controllable fashion. The mission of the Center is to create and grow entirely new and disruptive biomanufacturing technologies that will change the way biomedical products and therapeutic agents are manufactured. The Center is building an ecosystem that brings faculty from different disciplines together in highly integrated environments where investigators from different departments and different colleges form a research hub for biomanufacturing innovation.
There is an urgent need to develop effective technologies or toolboxes to help frontline healthcare workers to combat the coronavirus pandemic. In this study, we will collaborate with clinical investigators to develop ultraviolet (UVC) germicidal irradiation technology to disinfect and reuse N95 respirators. The overarching goal of this proposal is to fill the gap and generate new knowledge for more effectively disinfecting and reusing N95 respirators during covid-19 pandemic. The outcome of this study will provide comprehensive data and analyses on UVC N95 mask disinfection. These data are essential for an unbiased assessment of the decontamination technique, and will reveal insight into the extent to which coronaviruses can withstand UV irradiation. This data will provide unbiased evidence to frontline medical professionals as to the safety of the decontamination technique, which is currently unclear. Studies on ozone and high wavelength UVC irradiation will provide new knowledge for designing a better UVC N95 mask sterilization system. We anticipate that the results of the proposal will help guide future governmental decision making about how to manage and adapt to PPE shortages.
DEPARTMENT OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING STEPS UP TO FIGHT COVID-19
Researchers Take Aim at COVID-19
The COVID-19 global pandemic has spotlighted the need for an international research approach to mitigate infection spread. Staggering measures have been imposed globally to contain the pandemic, but the effectiveness of such measures rapidly succumbs to human mobility. Our project investigates how human mobility affects the contagion dynamics of COVID-19 in order to improve policy design for non-pharmaceutical interventions. It also brings together research scholars from the U.S., Japan, and Australia to study the impact of COVID-19 on international collaboration, and design an innovative mechanism to strengthen the resiliency and sustainability of cross-border research networks responding to future disruptive events.
The shelter-in-place approach to social distancing has had a devastating impact on the U.S. economy, but social distancing policies may be required for some time. To mitigate the economic consequences of prolonged social distancing measures, we propose to develop a “science and engineering for social distancing” model to design stratified curfew strategies that are both epidemic suppressing and economically sustainable. These mathematical and computational tools and related datasets could support policy makers for educational institutions, large companies, and governing bodies as they manage the economic and health impacts of COVID-19 as well as future pandemics.