Seed Grant Awards Description FY 2023

A feature-length documentary narrating the life of several Cubans who settled in Colorado in different time periods. The film explores the convergence of Cuban and Western American cultures. The piece examines the struggles, opportunities, and obstacles the Cuban diaspora has gone through while living in the United States, what they left behind, the concept of home, their interpersonal relationships, and their contributions to American society.

On November 19th, 2023, a lone gunman entered Club Q, an LGBTQ night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and opened fire with an assault rifle. The gunman killed five people before being tackled to the ground, disarmed, and beaten into submission by Richard (Rich) Fierro, an Army Combat Veteran. Rich was at Club Q attending a drag show with his wife, daughter and his daughter’s boyfriend, Raymond Green Vance. Tragically, Raymond would not survive the night. Rich was well known in the Colorado Springs community as the co-owner of Atrevida Beer Co., a self-described Latina Forward brewery with the motto Diversity, It’s on Tap.

The half-hour documentary Fierro = Steel, the first in a triptych of documentary films exploring violence in American culture, tells Rich’s story. It asks the question, what sort of person runs toward the gun fire? Fierro’s bold insights on diversity, courage, and unity remind us of what it takes to keep America a beacon of hope for all.

Adjacent to CU Denver’s campus, the old Chinatown in Denver was a residential and business district between Wazee and Market streets and from 15th street to 20th street. Due to historical moments of racial discrimination, social injustice, and political unrest, the old Chinatown, once considered the largest in the interior West, was demolished by the 1940s and is nowadays rarely known by the public. To promote public awareness and engagement with the hidden history, the proposed grant will be deployed to establish a research unit, Chinatown Initiative, focusing on the spatial research and potential urban redevelopment of Denver’s Chinatown. In collaboration with enterprises, institutions, and organizations, such as Colorado Asian Pacific United Organization and Denver Agency for Human Rights & Community Partnerships, the grant will lay out the foundation for future research activities that draw in external resources and fundings to unfold forces between social justice, environmental concern, and community displacement, promoting a sustainable model of urban redevelopment in Denver’s Chinatown.

Picaresque narratives tell the story of a rogue figure who travels widely across a territory, surviving by their wits as they discover worldly brutality and corruption. In my book manuscript, Rogues in Combat: Picaresque Narrative and the Genres of War, 1668-2020, I examine the global migration of the picaresque as a form for interpreting the space of war. I argue that across time, language, and medium, picaresque writing has served the purpose of disclosing and popularizing a hidden war history. In the era of nation-states, wars involve the suppression and distortion of crucial information, leaving behind a highly compromised historical record. Chronicles, news, memoirs, and textbooks tend to reinforce the inadequacy of the record by focusing primarily on the elite experience of officers and statesmen, and by avoiding atrocity, war crimes, cowardice, and betrayal. Picaresque war narratives offer the corrective of a counterhistory. They reveal an untold story of war, a history of events that has been covered up by state rhetoric and national biases.

This proposed project aims to elucidate the physics of the precipitation icing process on a flow-induced vibrating circular cylinder under a turbulent flow and to explore how these flow-induced vibrations (FIV) interact with the dynamic icing process and affect the structural loading and fatigue on the cylinder. This fundamental problem plays a key role in bridges, wind turbines, and offshore structures, with specific relevance to the scenario of failure of overhead power (or transmission) lines under extreme icing events (e.g., a major power crisis that affected Quebec in January 1998 and Texas in February 2021 during several extreme winter storms). Such a catastrophic failure of transmission lines suggests a need for a deeper understanding of the underlying physics of the problem (viz., combined, perhaps synergistic, effects of vibration and icing of transmission lines). As such, clarifying the importance of fluid-structure interactions under a changing geometry and roughness has the potential to produce long-term outcomes for significant advancements in predicting the lifespan and in conducting early pinpoint detection and maintenance of power transmission lines subject to the simultaneous effects of vibration and icing.

We propose to perform high impact research in modeling the ionosphere using deep learning techniques by combining the expertise of Dr. Mark Golkowski in electrical engineering, Dr. Ashis Biswas in Computer Science, and Ms. Srivani Inturi, who is a MS student in Computer Science. We have a novel approach. The novelty of our approach is to model both the lower and upper ionosphere using two different datasets and to also employ Deep Learning (DL) models. Figure 1 shows the ionospheric electron density profile vs. altitude. We will use observations of Very Low Frequency (VLF) waves to obtain information on the lower ionosphere (80 km – 100 km) and Total Electron Content (TEC) measurements for the higher altitudes. We intend to forecast the lower ionospheric behavior by using the ground-based VLF/LF data available in the Waldo database and the forecasting of the upper ionosphere by using the Global Ionospheric Maps (GIM) data, GIM data uses more than 200 receivers over the entire world providing TEC data. Ultimately, we will collect a large amount of input data over multiple seasons, years, and a complete solar cycle. This huge dataset along with appropriate influencing parameters will enable the deep-learning model to capture the variations and patterns within the ionosphere to forecast accurately at least a day ahead.

Biologists predict that global warming will pressure animals to move to cooler habitats at higher elevations. Although moving upslope can reduce the risk of overheating, high altitudes will present species with a suite of new threats to overcome, especially low oxygen (O2) availability. Consequently, to shift upslope and avoid the worst impacts of climate change, animals will need to possess or produce traits that buffer them against hypoxia. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few mammals and birds, we know surprisingly little about if or how most terrestrial animals overcome low O2 in the present —much less what strategies they might employ in the future. Thus, to understand if upslope dispersal is even a plausible response to climate change, we need insight into the mechanisms of hypoxia tolerance among terrestrial animals.

The volcanic sediments at Laetoli in northern Tanzania, preserve a plethora of fossilized fauna remains and animal trackways that provide evidence on human origins in eastern Africa 3.56 million years ago. Of particular interests are pre-human (hominin) remains and footprints assigned to Australopithecus afarensis that have been recovered at Localities 7 and 8 (including the hominin footprint trails at Laetoli). I am requesting support for our renewed and expanded paleoanthropological research at Laetoli in northern Tanzania that seeks to: (a) systematically recover additional hominin remains at three Localities that will allows us to establish the taxonomic status of two nearly complete mandibles recovered from Locality 7SW at Laetoli, (b) carry out a ground penetrating radar (GPR) probes to virtually recover additional hominin footprints that will allow us to establish whether more than one species of Australopithecus left their prints at Laetoli 3.56 million years ago, and (c) to use the data collected to develop a multi-years grant proposal to NSF (Biological Anthropology Program: Senior Research Awards BA-SR) and the National Geographic Society (Human Histories and Culture – Level II) grant.

Maternal health research has extensively documented soberingly high rates of morbidity and mortality among Black women and high rates of poor provider experiences for Black and Hispanic women in the US; racism has been found to be key driver of these disparities. Yet less is known of the maternal health experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US. Limited studies reveal significant variation in maternal health outcomes among AAPI individuals, with those of Chinese and Japanese descent more likely to experience obstetric trauma during vaginal deliveries and those of Filipino and Pacific Islander descent more likely to experience c-sections. Even with higher SES, greater likelihood of being privately insured, and living in wealthier neighborhoods compared to Whites, AAPI individuals experience worse maternal health outcomes, including higher rates of postpartum hemorrhage, severe vaginal tearing, need for mechanical ventilation, and mortality. This gap in the literature along with these disparate trends motivate my project: a multi-sited ethnographic study that examines the impact of race and racism on AAPI women/birthing individuals during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum.

In 2006, a biological treatment facility was installed [4] at the Lowry Superfund Site. What makes this facility unique is its use of naturally occurring microorganisms found in the contaminated water itself. The treatment involves pumping groundwater to surface tanks supplied with oxygen and phosphorous. Supplemented with suspended plastic supports to increase surface area, microorganisms in situ to the water attach to the supports in layers called biofilms. The biofilms are thought to be the primary site of microbial degradation of the 1,4-dioxane. Successfully removing up to 92% of the 1,4-dioxane, thus meeting regulatory standards, the plant is now faced with fluctuating 1,4-dioxane levels and increased regulatory removal requirements. These challenges require a better understanding of the microbiology happening in the bioreactors and a determination of whether the microorganisms can remove lower levels of the 1,4-dioxane [5,6] (note, the new requirement is not yet released). The goal of this study is to isolate 1,4-dioxane degrading microorganisms and describe their abilities to degrade 1,4-dioxane.

BURRO aims to tackle the issue of forest fire soil destabilization with an innovative solution that hands control back to nature through an array of biodegradable retaining pods seeded with tree saplings. The pods are individually driven into post-fire sloped landscapes and then interconnected to produce a distributed, robust, but flexible biodegradable retaining wall. Each pod collects, stores, and distributes water to a sapling tree inside to support its growth on a nutrient-deprived burn site. Over time, the sapling tree matures, emerging from the pod both above and below ground, and resulting in the decay and eventual consumption of the pod. New tree roots assume control of soil stability from the decayed and consumed pod.

The overarching objective of this proposal is to address the susceptibility of UAV communications to advanced traffic analysis attacks. Our defensive approach relies on perturbing the patterns of these communications based on a deep learning concept called adversarial example (AE) in order to obfuscate the patterns of the UAV traffic strategically and indistinguishably. Adversarial example methods exploit the susceptibility of deep learning models to input manipulation attacks, where small, carefully-tuned changes to the inputs can dramatically alter the deep learning models’ outputs. An adversarial example, in our scope, is a well-designed small perturbation that is incorporated into communications in the UAV ecosystem to obfuscate the identifying patterns of these communications, thus defeating adversarial traffic analysis attacks. We will explore the efficacy of existing AE methods (e.g., FGSM, DeepFool, PGD) and various perturbation strategies (e.g., adding fake packets, manipulating real packets’ size and timing, route randomization) against these protocols. Preliminary development of this defensive method (based on PGD) reduced the accuracy of traffic analysis in the mentioned UAV ecosystem from 97.8% to 47.2%, therefore manifesting the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed method.

Research on nonprofit resilience has grown rapidly over the last few years, and especially since the pandemic began. Yet, most research studies are qualitative studies with small sample sizes and were conducted at a single time point and with a few subsectors of nonprofits. The results of these studies have laid the groundwork for researchers to begin understanding nonprofit resilience, but a larger scale of research utilizing a more representative sample and tracking nonprofits over time is needed.

Therefore, this proposed research has two aims. The first aim responds to the call for the “’grand challenge’ of studying the role and functioning of organizations during adverse natural or social events” (e.g., van der Vegt et al., 2015). The objective is to examine the resilience of Colorado nonprofits in the post-pandemic era by answering these two overarching questions: 1) what tactics and strategies did Colorado nonprofits adopt in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and what are the impacts of these strategies on nonprofit resilience? 2) what are the organizational and leadership factors that enabled some nonprofits to be more resilient than others?

In order to achieve the first aim, the second aim is to set up a data infrastructure: the Colorado Nonprofit Research Panel, a survey panel that will recruit nonprofit executives to participate in survey 2 questionnaires. The proposed research will use this Research Panel to track participating nonprofits for at least two years post-pandemic. After the grant is completed, the research panel will be maintained for continuing research.