ISSE Seed Grants
ISSE makes annual funding available for multi-disciplinary, multi-investigator research and support. Each year, ISSE awards three or four seed grants to support research projects that are related to environmental sustainability. The aim is to support project teams as they develop interdisciplinary collaboration and build the capability to secure external funding. ISSE expects the funded teams to submit at least one external grant proposal and one article to a peer-reviewed publication acknowledging ISSE’s support. Among the topics of interest are
- Modeling sustainability and resilience, especially for regional systems, under climate changes and other social and environmental stressors;
- Systems or engineering solutions to reduce nutrient and pollution (e.g., microplastics) in water;
- Technologies and analyses for carbon sequestration; and
- Solutions or modeling to enhance environmental health.
For FY2023, a panel of independent reviewers scored all submissions and selected the following projects.
| Investigators | Project Title | |
|---|---|---|
| PI: Jiangang Chen (Public Health), coPIs: Jayne Wu (EECS) and Qiang He (CEE) | Assessing the levels of forever chemicals (PFAS) in surface water in Tennessee aquatic ecosystems | |
| PI: Alison Buchan (Microbiology) coPI: Qiang He (CEE) | Identification of novel pathways for bacterial degradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons | |
| PI: Boshan Huang (CEE), coPIs: Qiang He, Pawel Polaczyk (CEE) and Brian Long (Chem) | Utilization of waste plastics to build the next generation of sustainable and durable asphalt pavements | |
| PI: Chris Cherry (CEE), coPI: Daniel Costinett (EECS) | Micromobility Vehicle Second-Life Battery Applications: Market Inventory and End Use Feasibility Analysis |
Previous Seed Grants Awarded
| Khalid Alshibli | Gas Driven Fracture During Gas Production using 3D Synchrotron Computed Tomography (SMT) |
| Chris Clark | Analyzing Strategies for Diverting and Managing Organic Waste Streams in Tennessee |
| Anahita Khojandi | Multi-Sensor Data-Driven Inspection/Maintenance of Green Infrastructure |
| Steven Ripp | Emerging synthetic biology for plant phytosensing and agricultural sustainability |
| Douglas Hayes | Transport, Colloidal Behavior, Biodegradability, and Ecotoxicity of Micro- and Nanoplastics from Emergent Biodegradable Agroplastics in Aquatic Systems |
| Khalid Alshibli | Geochemical Interaction between CO2 and Caprock for safe Carbon Sequestration |
| Qiang He | Toward Precision Environmental Health Risk Management: Feasibility of Personalized Exposome Monitoring |
| Scott Lenaghan | Bioengineering of the Duckweed Plastid Genome: A Model Plant for Aquatic Bioremediation |
| Terry Hazen | Microbial-geochemical signatures for CO2 storage performance and sustainable development of unconventional shale resources |
| Scott Lenaghan | Bioengineering of the Duckweed Plastid Genome |
| Kelsey Ellis | Beat the Heat: Builiding adaptive capacity of vulverable populations in Knox County to combined stressors from climate change and urban heat. |
| Frank Loeffler | Microbial transformation and degradation of sulfonated per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. |
| Khalid Alshibli | Geochemical Interaction between CO2 and Caprock for Safe Carbon Sequestration |
| Jie Wu | Socioeconomic inequalities and drinking water quality: assessin arsenic concentrations in community water systems by novel field deployable biosensors. |
| Qiang He | Toward Precision Environmental Health Risk Management |