Awarded Grant Proposals FY20-21

At the beginning of spring semester, IIHCC launched a call for grant proposals. We received many compelling submissions, each of which was reviewed and ranked by three Virginia Tech faculty members representing a diverse range of disciplines. Today, we are excited to announce these three awarded proposals.

Title: CYBORGS: Compassionate deploYable spaces using Biosignals of Occupants for disaster Relief and Grid Service
PI: Ali Mehrizi-Sani (IIHCC cluster hire), Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Team: Kereshmeh Afsari, Assistant Professor, Construction
Amount: $50,000

Title: Investigation of Spent Nuclear Fuel Dry Cask System for Long-Term Storage
PI: Juliana Duarte (IIHCC cluster hire), Mechanical Engineering
Team: Rebecca Cai (IIHCC cluster hire), Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Sonja Schmid, Associate Professor, Department of Science, Technology and Society
Amount: $50,000

Title: A Clinical and Social Adoption Study of Frailty Diagnosis through Passive, In-Situ Gait Monitoring
PI: Rodrigo Sarlo (IIHCC cluster hire), Assistant Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
Team: Tiffany Drape, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Agricultural, Leadership, & Community Education
Joseph Scarpa, Jr., New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center
Sriram Malladi, Mechanical Eng., Michigan Technological University
Robin Queen, Associate Professor, Biomedical Eng. and Mechanics, Virginia Tech
Amount: $25,000

Congratulations to the three teams! In the May issue of IIHCC newsletter, we will publish the descriptions of these awarded proposals. Each of these three teams has an IIHCC cluster hire who plays a significant role, and they will be highlighted in the upcoming issues: Rebecca Cai in April, and Juliana Duarte and Ali Mehrizi-Sani in May. Our highlight on Rodrigo Sarlo can be found in our Winter 2019 issue.

These teams will present the progress of their research in the next fiscal year, so please stay tuned for event announcements. Additionally, the winners will be asked to give back to the IIHCC community by serving as reviewers for the next year’s grant application cycle. Although we are able to fund only a fraction of all proposed projects, we are very pleased with the range and types of research that emerged in the process. The proposals showed how the Virginia Tech IIHCC community can contribute to advancement of infrastructures, and gave us hope that we will have a positive impact on human communities, particularly at these challenging times.

Finally, we are grateful to these eight reviewers who, despite the preparation for sudden shift to online teaching, reviewed six or more proposals over the spring break:

Kereshmeh Afsari, Assistant Professor, Construction
Edward Becker, Assistant Professor, Architecture
Maggie Cowell, Associate Professor, Urban Affairs and Planning
Brandy Faulkner, Collegiate Assistant Professor, Political Science
Kevin Heaslip, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Eunju Hwang, Associate Professor, Apparel Housing and Resource Management
Myounghoon Philart Jeon, Associate Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering
Yuhao Zhang, Assistant Professor, Center for Power Electronics Systems