University of Kentucky Research Foundation

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-08

This project is jointly funded by the Environmental Chemical Sciences (ECS) Program of the Chemistry Division and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Program. Biomass burning emissions, including those from the combustion of wood for residential heating, release large quantities of catechol pollutant into the air. In the atmosphere, catechol contributes to form particulate matter and interacts with available mineral surfaces in ways that have eluded prior attention and can reduce visibility, worsen air quality, and affect climate. With this project, Professor Marcelo Guzman and his team at the University of Kentucky investigate a possible mechanism to produce sunlight absorbing chemicals from catechol in air. The project generates knowledge about the chemistry of wildfire and combustion emission on the surface of minerals with direct implications to air quality, public health, and climate. The project provides interdisciplinary training in environmental chemistry and environmental science to Kentucky’s graduate and undergraduate students. The project introduces novel pollution and separation knowledge to students from a public elementary school from underserved communities through educational activities built upon the proposed research. The study of interfacial photoreactions is at the forefront of atmospheric chemistry research to understand the fate of catechol, an abundant biomass burning pollutant, and explains the role played by mineral surfaces in the atmosphere. This project aims to reveal new mechanistic understanding of the transformation of catechol on mineral surfaces that are excited under sunlight irradiation. Specifically, the project will investigate the novel production of reactive oxygen species (e.g., OH radical and singlet molecular oxygen) by chromophores that can enhance the processing of pollutants on the surface of atmospheric particles. The project will create advanced experimental methods and utilize a combination of several spectroscopy, chromatography, and mass spectrometry techniques to study surface reactions under environmentally relevant sunlight and humidity conditions. The project will reveal electronic transitions of species produced on environmental interfaces, their structures, reaction kinetics, and other physical properties that impact air quality, public health, and climate. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-08

The sense of touch is fundamental to the lived experience of all animals, including humans. In vertebrates, the ability to convert physical force into an electrical signal that the brain interprets as touch relies on the ion channel Piezo2. Understanding how Piezo channels are developmentally regulated and discovering the differences in their function in species with diverse touch sensation are the focus of this investigation. The investigators will compare waterfowl species that have evolved to possess a finely honed sense of touch with those that do not, to reveal mechanisms of how neurons become touch-sensitive during development and the evolution of molecules that are critical for touch. This research will provide useful tools for studying touch, adding an important and overlooked layer of sensory information that will aid in understanding how these species use their habitats, and thus aid in their conservation. The project will enable training of scientists at multiple career stages in integrative research methods through funded research and course-based research activities. These activities seamlessly integrate into planned outreach at the Lexington Public Library (LPL), designed to teach critical vocational skills and increase scientific literacy and engagement from the broader community. In addition, the team will partner with LPL, Sylvan Heights Bird Park, and Prepared Minds lab and Advanced Robotics lab to bring about methodological and conceptual advances for the understanding of touch and waterfowl ecology. Currently, Piezo2 is the only verified mechanically gated ion channel known to transduce touch in vertebrate somatosensory neurons. While touch is important in an organismal/evolutionary context, how Piezo2 is transcriptionally regulated is unknown. Thus, there is a critical need to determine how Piezo2 is regulated both on developmental and evolutionary timescales. To accomplish this, investigators will leverage a novel clade of model organisms: ducks (Anatidae). Many species of duck are expert “tactile foragers,” using sense of touch in their bill which is innervated by trigeminal ganglia (TG) neurons to feed. The percentage of Piezo2 positive neurons expressed in duck TG varies widely in species with differing foraging behavior, suggesting Piezo2 is differentially regulated across species. Investigators will identify regulatory elements for Piezo2 using multiomics in TG neurons at developmental timepoints spanning the onset of Piezo2 expression and experimentally validate promoters/enhancers using in ovo electroporation of reporter constructs. This study will then characterize a second axis of Piezo2 regulation—its role in the evolution of sensory specialization by correlating Piezo2 expression, functional mechanosensitivity, and variation in regulatory elements in duck species with disparate mechanosensory abilities. Finally, Course-Based Undergraduate Research courses will refine and extend novel behavioral assays for quantifying tactile ability in ducks, with the immediate goal of determining the extent of behavioral species diversity in tactile foraging, and long-term goal of testing manipulations of Piezo2. This project is jointly funded by Organization/Neural Systems Cluster and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-07

Urgent medical care plays an invaluable role in saving the lives of people who experience a health emergency. However, less is known about how families manage and make decisions about longer-term healthcare needs of those who acquire disabilities after such health emergencies. This doctoral dissertation examines the social, political, and economic impacts of living with an acquired disability and identifies opportunities that could support people to live well with disabilities over the long-term. In addition to providing scientific training in empirical data collection and analysis for a graduate student in anthropology, research findings will be made available to people and families facing care needs from acquired disabilities, and with local organizational partners and state agencies to support new policies for healthcare and social support. It will also broaden the participation of scientists and communities in an EPSCoR jurisdiction. To investigate the relationship between disability, family care, and health decision-making the investigators will undertake long-term qualitative and community participatory research that includes participant observation, interviews, concept mapping, and photovoice. The researchers test for the impacts of multiple social, interpersonal, and systemic factors that drive decisions that people make for longer-term disability care. The research contributes to the anthropology of disability, medical anthropology of rural health systems, and the social science of biomedicine. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-07

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will develop transdisciplinary and convergent research approaches on cultural heritage and climate change, foster collaboration among the research community across several regions, and contribute to knowledge advances at the global level. The project focuses on the role that cultural landscapes can play as essential ecological and sociocultural services to help address climate change. The project will develop a toolkit to assist communities assess the vulnerability and resilience of cultural landscapes and further develop our understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of cultural landscapes and culturally informed strategies for climate mitigation and adaptation. The project team will work with local communities in France, Norway and Spain to develop assessment and planning tools for cultural landscapes based on the integrated analysis of social and ecological data. This information will be coupled with downscaled climate projections with clearly defined timescales to assist the communities in understanding potential risks and vulnerabilities and serve as a basis for decision-making. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-07

The broader impact of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is in enhancing the reliability of manufacturing facilities and the efficiency of production on shop floors, particularly for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs). By developing affordable and self-sustaining predictive maintenance (PM) solutions, the project aims to reduce unexpected machine downtimes and unnecessary maintenance costs. The technology integrates advanced machine learning (ML) tools with an edge-cloud computing infrastructure, enabling continuous and real-time monitoring of industrial equipment. This innovation is expected to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and practical application, providing SMMs with the tools necessary to compete in a technology-driven market. The societal benefits include increased operational efficiency, cost savings, and the promotion of sustainable manufacturing practices. The commercial potential includes the adoption of solutions that could revolutionize maintenance strategies across diverse manufacturing sectors, leading to broader economic benefits. The project addresses the critical need for cost-effective and generalizable PM solutions in the manufacturing industry. The primary research objective is to develop a low-cost, self-sustaining edge device, to be equipped with ML-based data analytics and deployed in a streamlined edge-cloud computing infrastructure, for real-time equipment monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis. The project will focus on three key innovations: (1) designing an edge device that integrates sensors with an energy harvesting module and microcontroller-deployable ML algorithms, facilitating self-powered, continuous, and prompt machine monitoring and diagnosis; (2) creating a generalizable ML-based diagnosis and prognosis tool that can continuously update itself using unlabeled data streams and be scalable to diverse manufacturing environments, and (3) establishing an integrated edge-cloud data processing and decision-making pipeline for efficient deployment of these tools on the shop floor. These developed hardware and software solutions will be tested in both laboratory and industrial settings, followed by pilot projects to validate the technology's efficacy and adaptability. The anticipated technical results include high detection accuracy, reduced maintenance costs, and improved machine uptime, ultimately advancing the state of PM in manufacturing. This project is jointly funded by Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) program, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-07

Plants respond to environmental and developmental cues in numerous ways. One such response involves the control of gene expression via a process known as alternative polyadenylation (APA). APA is known to impact plant development and to affect the responses of plants to conditions such as elevated temperature or infection by pathogens. However, many questions remain concerning the connections between the cue (developmental or stress) and the protein machinery (the polyadenylation complex) that mediates and regulates APA. This project focuses on where and when in the plant these connections are made, and how these connections affect the composition of the machinery that mediates the process. To this end, a spectrum of tools will be brought to bear – the activity of the complex will be assayed at the single cell and sub-cellular levels, and the composition of this complex will be studied in mutants of the model plant Arabidopsis that lack strategic protein subunits. This research will lead to a better understanding of the growth and development of crop plants, and their responses to various stresses, the results of which will benefit crop breeding in the future. This project will also provide training opportunities for postdoctoral scientists, undergraduate students, and faculty from a range of post-secondary institutions. Eukaryotic messenger RNA polyadenylation is mediated by a large complex (the PolyAdenylation Complex, or PAC). This project will test the model that variability in subunit composition is a key mechanism by which the plant PAC is regulated. Three aims will be pursued. One will test the hypothesis that the activity of the PAC varies in specific cells and tissues. The second will test the hypothesis that the composition of the plant PAC determines its RNA substrate specificity. The third will test the hypothesis that the composition of the functional plant PAC can vary. A diverse range of experimental approaches will be used. The activity of the PAC will be assayed in different root cells using single cell transcriptomics approaches. The RNA specificity of the PAC will be assayed in nuclear extracts from cells lacking PAC subunits. The compositions of complexes affinity-purified from different mutants will be determined by mass spectrometry. This research will provide new insights into an evolutionarily-conserved complex and will impact fields of study beyond plant science. These studies will engage postdoctoral scientists, graduate students, and several undergraduate trainees. Workshops directed towards faculty at undergraduate-focused and minority-serving institutions will be conducted. Participants will be trained in aspects of proteomics, next generation sequencing, and single cell transcriptomics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-07

This doctoral dissertation research project examines the role of the advertising industry in shaping the attention economies of digital media. Advertising revenues are vitally important to the digital media industry, where many free-to-use platforms generate profit from the attention of their users. This research asks how the advertising industry conceptualizes the attention of consumers such that it can be measured, valued, and exchanged as a market good. This project focuses particularly on the spatial contexts for the valuation of attention across diverse forms of media, ranging from digital media to printed media to outlets that are geographically located (e.g., roadside billboards). By situating advertisers' understandings of attention within their historical and spatial contexts, the project advances a holistic perspective on the multifaceted economics and experiences of commercial media. This perspective allows for new insights regarding the consequences and possibilities of digital media for individual and collective well-being. Among other contributions, the findings assist efforts to mitigate the potentially harmful effects of social media advertising and trains a graduate student. The project draws throughlines between historical and contemporary advertising knowledge and practices of attention via discursive analyses of a wide range of materials from within the advertising industry. The researchers analyze archival materials from advertising agencies, professional organizations, and researchers to establish the historical relationships between attention measurements and commercial media. They combine this analysis with an examination of technical documents from advertising technology and social media platforms to determine the continuities and novelties of digital media with respect to attention measures. Finally, the researchers conduct observations at industry conferences and expert interviews with advertising professionals to investigate how modern advertisers apply practical knowledge of attention. Through its focus on the spatial and historical contexts of media, the project brings together disparate scholarship from geography, media studies, science and technology studies, psychology, and economics to speak to pressing concerns about the encroachment of digital media technologies into the spaces of Americans’ everyday lives. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.