ARRA funds for research are being applied in a variety of projects ranging from energy to health and social development
Arizona State University researchers to date have received more than $32 million in stimulus package research grants. For ASU, which has played a very active role in attracting this additional funding, much of these research funds have gone for projects that meet challenges currently confronting society.
Projects funded include work to unlock the secrets of photosynthesis for new sources of energy; research into a computational understanding of the skills required in surgical training; development of a new method for screening and diagnosing tuberculosis in children; a study on child development and immigrant adaptation; and development of a new type of robotic hand.
Funds for these projects come from the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation, said Sethuraman "Panch" Panchanathan, ASU's deputy vice president for research and economic affairs.
"Funding for these projects come at a critical time as we look to finding new sources of renewable energy, smarter ways of diagnosing and fighting diseases, and better ways to educate our next generation workforce," Panchanathan said. "Now is the time to invest in bold new ideas that result in large scale innovation and entrepreneurship."
The research funds are part of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the federal economic stimulus package approved in February. Several Federal agencies have been allocated a portion of this money for funding competitive research proposals from universities for work on basic and applied research in critical areas of national importance.
These grants are restricted to use for specific research projects and cannot be used to fund general university expenses. However, they do add a significant amount of money to the state economy.
The ASU projects involve teams of researchers from across the university and across the country. This leverages ASU's strength in interdisciplinary research, Panchanathan said. Highlights of ASU's newly funded projects include:
Power from sunlight
The largest stimulus grant awarded ASU -- $14 million for five years -- has come from the Department of Energy to set up an Energy Frontier Research Center that will focus on research on solar energy conversion based on the principles of photosynthesis. The goal of ASU's new center is to design and construct a synthetic system that uses sunlight to convert water cheaply and efficiently into hydrogen fuel and oxygen.
Society requires a renewable source of fuel that is widely distributed, abundant, inexpensive and environmentally clean. The use of solar energy to produce a clean fuel such as hydrogen is essentially the only process that can satisfy these criteria at a scale large enough to meet the world's energy demands.
Plants and similar organisms use photosynthesis to oxidize water, producing oxygen and fuel compounds such as carbohydrate and hydrogen. The system to be developed in the ASU center will be designed using principles borrowed from these natural processes.
"This grant will allow us to put together a complete system that starts with the absorption of sunlight and ends with the creation of a clean fuel, such as hydrogen," said Devens Gust, an ASU professor of chemistry and biochemistry who is director of the new center.
"It also will provide resources to educate students at all levels about renewable energy, and it could lead to whole new industries," Gust added.
Easier diagnosis of pediatric TB
A grant of $107,700 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Robert Husson at Children's Hospital in Boston and Joshua LaBaer, director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Medicine at ASU's Biodesign Institute, will improve methods for detecting tuberculosis (TB) in children.
An accelerating TB epidemic in settings where HIV is highly prevalent demands new tools for TB control. One area of great need, especially for pediatric TB, is improved diagnosis. The standard approach of sputum smear microscopy and culture are insensitive, especially in children and in HIV infected persons of all ages. They also require laboratory resources and skilled personnel.
LaBaer has been working with his colleague in Boston on new, high throughput technologies in the field of functional proteomics, which seeks to understand the roles proteins play in the human body. In this project, LaBaer will produce microscopic arrays of Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins that can be screened with patient serum to identify antigens of that can be used to develop new anti-body based tests for TB in children.
Helping children improve their oral language
A $130,527 grant from the NIH is helping ASU researcher Shelley Gray tackle the challenges that children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) face in trying to understand and use new words.
Children with SLI often have poor vocabularies. It is not that they cannot learn new words, but they require significantly more exposure to new words before they can store sufficient phonological and semantic information to recognize and produce them. This has a negative impact on their oral language and literacy development, especially reading comprehension.
This project is investigating whether phonological or semantic encoding or retrieval cues help children with SLI learn new words faster, said Gray, an ASU associate professor of Speech and Hearing Science.
"Faster word learning will result in a larger vocabulary," Gray said. "This is crucial for preventing reading comprehension problems and for closing the academic gap between children with SLI and children with typical language development as they progress through school."
Child development and immigrant adaptation
School can be tough on any child, but for children new to the U.S., it can become an ordeal as they try to acclimate to a new school and a new country. With a $221,575 NIH grant, Jennifer Glick, an ASU associate professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics, will take an integrative approach to study child development and immigrant adaptation.
Children of newly arrived immigrants can find many ways to adapt in the U.S. depending on the resources of the family and the interactions they receive in the community. If society fails to support immigrant adaptation, it's expected that the child's school performance will suffer.
However, the child's family and ethnic community may bring additional resources to the education sphere. Thus, the interaction of family background, parental involvement and community context all will influence developmental and educational outcomes for children in immigrant families. A key goal of this study is to go beyond using immigrant status as a proxy for other traits to determine how family migration context -- including parent's age and arrival, language background and use, national origins and ethnicity -- are related to school readiness and early academic progress.