IACS invests $1M in Seed Grant Program

IACS invests $1M in Seed Grant Program 

 

The Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) is making a $1M investment in its revamped seed grant funding. This competition, open exclusively to IACS Core and Affiliate faculty, is rooted in a special 2019 gift from their anonymous founding donor. 

 

IACS Director Robert Harrison led the charge to expand the program in 2024. Originally targeting projects in the $70K range, the funding for projects was expanded up to $250K, inviting one- and two-year proposals. 

 

The IACS Seed Grant Program aims to accelerate innovation, funding groundwork that will enable researchers to go after larger extramural grants.

 

“The goal of the seed fund is to expand advanced growth,” said Alan Calder, Deputy Director and Interim Co-Director of IACS. “We want research that is heavy on computation. It could be mathematical modeling, it could be AI, it could be machine learning. We want work that will contribute to science and society.” 

 

The Office of Proposal Development (OPD) in the Office of the Vice President for Research provided a critical logistical framework for the revamped 2024 call. Under the leadership of Sheri Clarke, and with experienced management from Toni Foster, their assistance delivered a smooth application and review process for this new incarnation of the IACS Seed program. OPD has agreed to provide similar support to the 2025 IACS Seed competition, which closes February 24, 2025; more information may be found on the IACS website Opportunities section, here. 

 

Three projects were funded in the 2024 cycle, exemplifying the mission to support early stages of advanced computational thinking and research.

 

• Margaret Schedel, IACS Core faculty and Professor of Composition and Computer Music, received IACS large grant seed funding for her 2-year project with the team of Owen Rambow, Jordan Kodner, and Mason Youngblood. 

 

• Mary Collins, IACS Affiliate faculty and Associate Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, received 1-year project funding, leading the multidisciplinary team of Heather Lynch, IACS Endowed Chair of Ecology & Evolution and Director of the Collaborative for the Earth (C4E), and Jaymie R. Meliker, Professor in the Department of Family, Population, & Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine.

 

• IACS Affiliate Professor Wei Zhu will begin her 1-yr seed-funded project, A Web Tool for Regional Sea Level Forecast for All Global Coastal Communities, in January. Her three co-investigators are Zhenhua Liu, Associate Professor, AMS and Computer Science (CS) Departments; Minghua Zhang, IACS Affiliate Faculty and Distinguished Professor, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS); and Wuyin Lin, Staff Scientist in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

 

The Origin of Creativity In Music and Language

Margaret Schedel and her team are looking to explore the drivers of creativity in the human brain.

 

History and culture investigations have identified patterns of new ideas, such as music genres. But the question still remains as to where these new ideas emerge from. Schedel’s team will tackle this question of cultural evolutionand investigate how people come up with new ideas in language and music through experiments and mathematical tools.

 

“The major aim of the project is to understand how and why people create new forms,” said Mason Youngblood, a co-PI and postdoctoral fellow in IACS. “So whether that is in music or in language, and under what conditions those new forms are best able to spread and be improved upon by others.”

 

To gather data, Schedel’s team will host an interdisciplinary workshop on “Collective Creativity” at IACS, Future Histories Studios, the Humanities Institute, and the AI Institute. The workshop will serve as a way of bringing together both well-established and early-career experts on creativity to share their expertise. Some of the workshop will be open to the public as well.

 

“By studying language and music simultaneously, we should be able to move a little bit faster on the research,” said Schedel. “If something is promising in one area, we can quickly see if it works in the other area, and then we'll know that it's a generalizable creativity instead of specifically related to language.”

 

This seed grant will enable Schedel’s team to lay the groundwork to then compete for much larger grants. With more funding and research, they hope to expand their studies to explore a variety of related questions, including directly comparing the creative capacities of AI and humans. 

 

Forever Chemicals and Their Effect on Birth Outcomes 

Mary Collins and her team are investigating the impact of chemicals in drinking water on adverse birth outcomes.

 

Collins is specifically looking into what is known as “forever chemicals,” which are man-made industrial chemicals typically found in personal care products or paint coatings. Typically, forever chemicals are used to increase the durability of items.

 

“Forever chemicals are widely incorporated into varieties of products, and they have been linked to health impacts and have recently been subjected to regulatory effort at the federal level,” said Collins. “That's the background of why we chose them.”

 

IACS has not only provided Collins with the funds to begin her work but also provides a collaborative environment where her work can be discussed and expanded upon by colleagues.

“There's a lot of excitement and a huge diversity of how people are using computational approaches to address the research questions that they have,” said Collins. “You never know who might be doing something that has a wildly different topic than you, but using an approach that you could apply to your own work.”

 

-Angelina Livigni