grants

Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice and Vice President for Research Gregory F. Ball sent the following email today to faculty and staff:

It is with great enthusiasm and excitement that we provide this update regarding the Grand Challenges Grants program, which will provide up to $30 million in institutional investments to fund initiatives and projects designed to accelerate solutions to society’s largest and most complex problems.

In response to the call for proposals for Grand Challenges Institutional Grants, 24 letters of intent (LOIs) were submitted, involving 210 faculty and well over 100 staff from all 12 colleges and schools and several campus divisions. The proposed projects address critical issues such as climate change, literacy, democracy, sustainable environments, pandemic preparedness, and many others. Upon completion of the review process, nine proposals for Institutional Grants were selected to move forward to the next phase:

Maryland Initiative for Literacy & Equity (MILE)
PI: Donald Bolger (EDUC); Co-PIs: Colin Phillips, Juan Uriagereka, Kira Gor (ARHU); Rochelle Newman, José Ortiz, Nan Ratner (BSOS); Elizabeth Bonsignore (INFO); Jade Wexler, Jason Chow, Jeff MacSwan, Melinda Martin-Beltran, Maggie Peterson, Jennifer Turner, Drew Fagan, Kellie Rolstad, Rachel Romeo, Ebony Terrell Shockley, Ayanna Baccus, Christy Tirrell-Corbin, Susan De La Paz (EDUC)

Making the World of Digital Technologies Accessible for People With Disabilities
PI: Jonathan Lazar (INFO); Co-PIs: Paul T. Jaeger, J.Bern Jordan, Hernisa Kacorri, Amanda Lazar, Elizabeth Zogby (INFO); Ana Palla (DIT)

Center for Critical Urban Studies
PI: Willow Lung-Amam (ARCH); Co-PIs: Nancy Raquel Mirabal (ARHU), Devon Payne-Sturges (SPHL)

Addressing Climate Challenges for a Sustainable Earth
PI: Ellen Williams (CMNS); Co-PIs: Tatiana Loboda (BSOS); Timothy Canty, Sumant Nigam, James Farquhar (CMNS)

Pandemic Preparedness, Response, Management and Resilience Institute
PI: Sandra Quinn (SPHL) Co-PIs: Cynthia Baur, Donald Milton, Neil Sehgal (SPHL); Jelena Srebric (ENGR); Brooke Liu (ARHU); Spyridon Marinopoulos (UHC)

Global FEWture: Advancing Transformative Food-Energy-Water Solutions to Ensure Community Resilience in a Changing Climate
PI: Amy Sapkota (SPHL); Co-PIs: Yael Mishael (University of Jerusalem); Dina Borzekowski, Rachel Goldstein, Rianna Murray, Leena Malayil (SPHL); Shirley Micallef, Stephanie Lansing (AGNR); Gili Marbach-Ad, Xin-Zhong Liang (CMNS); Jennifer Cotting (ARCH); Allen Davis (ENGR); Thurka Sangaramoorthy (BSOS)

Center of Excellence in Microbiome Sciences
PI: Mihai Pop (CMNS); Co-PI: Stephanie Yarwood (AGNR)

Institute For Democracy Research, Education, and Civic Action
PI: Lena Scott (EDUC); Co-PIs: Michael Hanmer (BSOS); Sarah Oates, Rafael Lorente, Tom Rosenstiel (JOUR); Paul Brown, Nathan Dietz (SPP); Luke Butler, Doug Lombardi, Sarah McGrew, Lucas Payne Butler (EDUC)

Human-Centered AI Institute
PI: Hal Daumé III (CMNS); Co-PIs: Jordan Boyd-Graber, Huaishu Peng, Marine Carpuat (CMNS); Joel Chan, Hernisa Kacorri, Susannah Paletz, Katie Shilton (INFO); Eric Hoover (BSOS); Jing Liu (EDUC); Debra Shapiro (BMGT)

We want to thank each of the teams that took the time to submit a proposal for the Grand Challenges Institutional Grants. The review process was comprehensive. Each LOI was reviewed and evaluated based on the proposed initiatives' targeted grand challenge, potential for societal impact, scalability, measurability, and interdisciplinary collaboration with key partners and stakeholders. The high quality of the LOI submissions and the broad range of Grand Challenges initiatives that were proposed made the selection process very difficult.

The next step in the application process requires all nine teams to participate in a Grand Challenges Accelerator workshop to further refine their ideas. Teams will then develop a presentation for university leadership later this fall. Funding will be awarded in January to selected proposals, which could each receive up to $3 million in total support over the next three years.

The deadline for Team and Individual Project Grant proposals has been extended to Oct. 10. These grants will provide funding for teams and individuals to engage in innovative and impactful research, scholarship and creative activities designed to address grand challenges in service to humanity.

One major commitment in the University of Maryland Strategic Plan, Fearlessly Forward: In Pursuit of Excellence and Impact for the Public Good is to take on humanity's grand challenges. We look forward to supporting these important initiatives that demonstrate our capabilities to take on the greatest challenges of our time and move our state, nation, and world Fearlessly Forward.

Sincerely,

Jennifer King Rice
Senior Vice President and Provost
She/Her/Hers

Gregory F. Ball
Vice President for Research
He/Him/His

With the goal to reimagine learning at the University of Maryland, the university’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center has awarded funding to over 100 educational projects across campus focused on expanding active and experiential learning, broadly conceived. Twenty of those awards are to faculty in the College of Arts and Humanities.

The projects focus on the redesign of a specific course or course section(s) (up to $20,000 per proposal) or include a cluster of courses and/or educational activities (up to $70,000 per proposal). 

“Reimagine learning” is one of four commitments in the new UMD Strategic Plan, describing the vision to move the institution “fearlessly forward in pursuit of excellence and impact for the public good.” 

A list of funded proposals with Principal Investigators from ARHU are as follows: 

Neel Ahuja, professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of American Studies: “Art- and Technology-Based Experiential Pedagogy on Institutional and Structural Racism” 

Thomas Earles, assistant director of the Writing Center in the Department of English: “Reimagine Learning: Develop Multilingual Tutoring in the Writing Center” 

Lauren Edelstein, lecturer in the Department of Communication: “Cultivating Skills for Engaging Constructively in Conflicts”

Emily Egan, assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology: “Learning Through Replication”

Shawn Parry-Giles, professor and chair of the Department of Communication: “COMM 360: Rhetoric of Black America” 

Elisa Gironzetti, assistant professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures: “Spanish at Work - Internships and experiential learning modules for Spanish in the Professions” 

Avital Karpman, associate clinical professor in the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies and the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures: “Gender-Inclusion in the Foreign Language Class” 

Manel Lacorte, professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures: “Language Learning for Multilingual Societies: Experiential Learning and Project Based Curricula” 

Siv B. Lie, assistant professor in the School of Music: “Rethinking Music and Culture in Hybrid Environments” 

Cynthia Lee Martin, associate professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures: “The Art of Dissent: Aesthetics, Politics and Civil Disobedience” 

Scott Trudell, associate professor in the Department of English: “Literature of Science and Technology: Inspiring and Sustaining Experiential, Project-Based Learning” and “Introduction to Digital Studies: Inspiring and Sustaining Experiential, Project-Based Learning” 

Patrik Widrig, professor in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies: “Site-specific Choreography & Dance Film Course” 

Colleen Woods, associate professor of history: “Preserving Immigrant Stories, Cultivating Student Research: Redesigning IMMR 400” 

Minglang Zhou, professor and program director of Chinese in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures: “Integrating Chinese Language Partnership into CHIN101” and “Integrating Chinese Language Partnership into CHIN301” 

Interdisciplinary proposals: 

Michelle V. Rowley, associate professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (with the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences): “Black Feminist Thought: Pedagogy as Civic Engagement” 

Katherine A. O'Neill, lecturer in the Department of English (with the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences): “A Science Writing Course (ENGL 390) for Chemistry and Biochemistry Majors: A Collaborative Approach to Teaching Writing in STEM Disciplines” 

Peter Mallios, associate professor of English (with Undergraduate Studies): “Mass Incarceration and Academic Writing: Teaching Academic Writing in Prison” 

Abigail McEwen, associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology (with Undergraduate Studies): “Art & Activism and Carillon Communities” 

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The University of Maryland has received a $1.75 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to continue development of open-source technology to expand digital access to manuscripts and books from the premodern Islamicate world in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu.

Matthew Thomas Miller, assistant professor in the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, leads the interdisciplinary team of researchers, including David Smith from Northeastern University, Sarah Bowen Savant from Aga Khan University (AKU) in London, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick from the University of California, San Diego, and Raffaele Viglianti from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at Maryland. The Mellon Foundation has been funding the project, known as “OpenITI AOCP,” since 2019.

“Over the past four years we have made incredible progress on the creation of digital infrastructure for Islamicate studies, and that is thanks in large part to the Mellon Foundation,” Miller said. “We are honored that the foundation continues to support our efforts to expand access to and digitally preserve such a rich and important cultural tradition.”

There are currently hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—of premodern Islamicate books and manuscripts that are not able to be accessed digitally by academics or the public, Miller said.

Thus far, the project team—made up of computer science and humanities experts—has successfully improved the accuracy of open-source Persian and Arabic optical character recognition (OCR) software, which is a system that turns physical, printed documents into machine-readable text. Under the new grant, they will use this OCR software to produce 2,500 new digitized Persian and Arabic texts, as well as expand the OCR system’s capabilities into Ottoman Turkish and Urdu.

They also aim to improve the accuracy of open-source handwritten text recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script manuscripts. A subfield of OCR technology, HTR tools are designed to read a diversity of human handwriting types with high levels of accuracy.

The team will also roll out a user-friendly redesign of its eScriptorium platform, which hosts the open-source tools. This latest Mellon grant will last three years. (Last year, Miller also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the project.)

Though he hopes its next phase of developments mark a major improvement for Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu texts, Miller said the goal ultimately is for the open-source tools to be used across a wide variety of languages.

“We really hope the technology will be reused by other users, especially those working in other under-resourced languages,” he said. “It’s designed to meet the needs of varied users.”

Image description: Persian ruba‘i (quatrain) calligraphy dating between circa 1610 and circa 1620. Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection. Learn more.