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ARHU Faculty Awarded Grand Challenges Grants
2/16/23

By ARHU Staff

In support of programs, initiatives and projects designed to impact enduring and emerging societal issues, the University of Maryland’s Grand Challenges Grants Program has awarded $30 million in funding to 50 projects and 185 faculty members across every school and college on campus. Among them, ARHU faculty are the recipients of one Institutional Grant, three Impact Awards, four Team Project Grants and one Individual Project Grant.

ARHU faculty are partnering with colleagues across campus to focus on groundbreaking and impactful research on topics including racial and social justice, education, pandemic preparedness and ethical technologies. Their work will shape the future of our community, state, nation and world.

Grand Challenges Grants with ARHU faculty involvement are outlined below. Please visit each project page for comprehensive details and a full list of participating faculty.

INSTITUTIONAL GRANT (up to $1M per year for 3 years of funding): 

Maryland Initiative for Literacy & Equity (MILE): seeks to transform and integrate practices in education, speech pathology, library sciences, and parent/family engagement through streamlined and cutting-edge models of professional development and community outreach. (Colleges Represented: College of Education (EDUC), ARHU, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS), College of Information Studies (INFO), School of Public Policy (SPP))

Principal Investigator (PI): Donald Bolger (EDUC)

ARHU Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs): 

Kira Gor, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Colin Phillips, Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Department of Linguistics; Director, Language Science Center

Juan Uriagereka, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Department of Linguistics

Learn more: research.umd.edu/mile

IMPACT AWARDS (up to $250K per year for 2 years of funding): 

Urban Equity Collaborative: seeks to strengthen community-based institutions and the work of community activists around issues of urban inequality. (Colleges Represented: School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (ARCH), ARHU, School of Public Health (SPHL))

PI: Willow Lung-Amam (ARCH)

ARHU Co-PI: Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/urbanequity

Pandemic Preparedness Institute (PPI): integrates a broad array of social and behavioral sciences to learn from COVID-19 and other disasters to better prepare for future public health emergencies. (Colleges Represented: SPHL, ARHU, BSOS, EDUC, INFO, Philip Merrill College of Journalism (JOUR))

Co-PI: Cynthia Bauer (SPHL) 

ARHU Co-PI and team members: 

Brooke Fisher Liu (Co-PI), Professor, Department of Communication

Anita Atwell Seate, Associate Professor, Department of Communication

Carina Zelaya, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication

Learn more: research.umd.edu/ppi

Values-Centered Artificial Intelligence: aims to promote the development of AI in a way that is not only ethical, but that advances human well-being more generally. (Colleges Represented: College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS), ARHU, Robert H. Smith School of Business (BMGT), BSOS, EDUC, INFO, JOUR, SPHL) 

PI: Hal Daumé III (CMNS)

ARHU Co-PI: John Horty, Professor, Department of Philosophy

Learn more: research.umd.edu/vcai

TEAM PROJECT GRANTS (up to $500K per year for 3 years of funding):

Africa Through Language and Area Studies (ATLAS): will establish a central focal point for the study of African languages, history and contemporary issues in the UMD community with the goal of increasing the understanding of the African continent and its growing global influence. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, BSOS) 

ARHU PI: Miranda Abadir, Second Language Acquisition, National Foreign Language Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/atlas

Music Education for All: aims to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, VAIolin, that will democratize music education. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, CMNS) 

ARHU PI: Irina Muresanu, Associate Professor, School of Music

Learn more: research.umd.edu/music-ai

Fostering Inclusivity Through Technology (FIT): will develop a video-calling platform that promotes mutual understanding by highlighting team sentiment, building rapport with strangers, connecting past and current topics in conversations, and unobtrusively identifying and resolving misunderstandings. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, BGMT, CMNS, A. James Clark School of Engineering (ENGR), INFO) 

PI: Yi Ting Huang (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PI: Shevaun Lewis, Assistant Research Professor and Assistant Director, Language Science Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/fit

Anti-Black Racism Initiative: seeks to build upon the state of Maryland’s legacy of racial equity and social justice and will position the University of Maryland as a leading anti-Black racist institution through three strategic and institutional initiatives that will amplify the new anti-Black racism (ABR) minor. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, EDUC, SPHL)

PI: Jeanette Snider (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PIs: 

John Drabinski, Professor, African American Studies and English, Department of English

Psyche Williams-Forson, Professor and Chair, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/abri

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT GRANT (up to $50,000 per year for 3 years): 

Human Rights Politics and Policies: Lessons from Latin America: two conferences, three articles and an edited volume that provides a definitive history of human rights in Latin America and corrects overly broad criticisms of human rights movements made by scholars who work on the United States and Europe. (College Represented: ARHU) 

Karin Rosemblatt, Professor and Director of the Center for Historical Studies, Department of History

Learn more: research.umd.edu/human-rights-latin-america

Making Moves to Counter Misinformation
12/8/21

By Maryland Today Staff 

While the world contended with a pandemic, social media platforms and other sources spewed billions of misleading health messages at users—more than 3.8 billion times on Facebook over the course of a year, according to one study—a dynamic that University of Maryland researchers and their colleagues say can lead to adverse public health outcomes ranging from mistrust in reliable information sources to deaths from disease.

Now, these risk communication experts in the Department of Communication and at the University of Georgia (UGA) are collaborating with researchers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop and test messaging strategies that can help overcome misinformation during public health emergencies.

Supported by a three-year, nearly $225,000 award from the FDA, communication Professor Brooke Fisher Liu and Yan Jin, professor of public relations and Georgia Athletic Association professor at UGA, will develop and test message strategies concerning vital health information that can help keep people safe.

“Past research found a clear link between COVID-19 misinformation exposure and vaccine hesitancy,” said Liu, the project’s principal investigator. “Research also connects misinformation exposure to lower compliance with government health and safety guidance. In short, misinformation is just as great of a threat to public health as the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, but our knowledge is limited on how to combat misinformation.”

The researchers will be among the first to explore how public health misinformation can be corrected through strategic risk communication and what methods work best in thwarting misinformation. They will conduct two large-scale online experiments on how messages containing misinformation and various types of corrective responses are interpreted by U.S. adults.

“This project exemplifies the importance and promising future for more collaborative risk and crisis communication research across universities and with the government to provide theory-driven, evidenced-based insights to protect public health and safety,” said Jin, co-principal investigator.

Liu and Jin’s research collaborations date back to 2001, when they both studied in the graduate program at the Missouri School of Journalism. Now they are joined by graduate research assistants Tori McDermott from UMD, and Xuerong Lu from UGA.

In addition to the experimental results, the research team will also provide a targeted deep-dive analysis of previous research, and will recommend best practices for how public health agencies can combat health misinformation for current and future threats.

This article was adapted from a news release by the University of Georgia.

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