Seed Grant Awards Description FY 2026

As generative AI becomes embedded in writing, communication, and civic  life, public universities face urgent questions about how intelligence is being redefined and experienced. This seed project advances a humanities-centered, equity-driven inquiry that treats intelligence not as a technical attribute of machines but as a relational, culturally situated, and ethically charged human capacity. Focusing on students enrolled in CU Denver’s core-curriculum English and Communication courses, we will adapt the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to capture real-time, AI-mediated experiences of attention, judgment, creativity, and authorship in the flow of academic work. With the support of additional grants we are actively seeking, longitudinal ESM data will be integrated with interviews and focus groups to reveal how students exercise, negotiate, outsource, resist, or harness intelligence in practice, and how these dynamics vary across linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic identities. Seed activities will include validating ESM instruments, recruiting and retaining our first student cohort, and generating an analyzable baseline dataset. Further research findings will inform curricular change and faculty learning communities co-led with the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning and the Teaching Innovation and Program Strategy Division. Deliverables include an anonymized pilot dataset, validated instruments, IRB protocol, and a funding-ready prospectus with preliminary findings and a dissemination plan. The seed will position the team to submit competitive proposals to external sponsors (e.g., Mellon Foundation, Spencer Foundation, MacArthur Foundation) within 6 months of the spending deadline, advancing democratic, equitable, and human-centered approaches to AI integration across the curriculum.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has launched the Health Research Collaborative (HRC) to elevate the visibility, impact, and external funding of health-related research at CU Denver. In its inaugural year, the HRC will prioritize the Health Humanities, recognizing their critical role in shaping how health, illness, care, and equity are understood and addressed. This proposal seeks to accelerate health humanities research by supporting the development of Health Humanities Research Teams (HHRTs) that will generate 2–3 competitive grant applications (targeting NEH Collaborative Grants) and produce an edited health humanities volume, positioning the downtown campus as a national hub where health humanities scholarship thrives.

Phase 1 focused on establishing the HRC as an interdisciplinary infrastructure for collaboration and research development. Phase 2, launching in summer 2026, will involve a scoping analysis of the landscape of Health Humanities research to accelerate Health Humanities research. This data-driven scoping effort will strategically position HHRTs to pursue external funding aligned with their scholarly strengths and emerging opportunities. Throughout the year, our HHRTs will share and receive feedback on their work and meet with RDO staff to develop funding applications that synthesize our research areas.

At a time when healthcare systems face crises of trust, equity, and communication, technical solutions alone are insufficient. Health Humanities strengthen public trust, promote community engagement, and position our campus as a leader in the human dimensions of health. A modest investment in health humanities fosters strategic capacity poised for larger investments in future humanities initiatives.

This summer, we plan to film Miss Lonelyheart’s Memory Light, a feature film blending magical realism and coming-of-age drama set in 1990’s Denver. Florence Young will act as the writer/director, and Nathan Thompson will act as Production Designer. This activity will advance both of our creative practices while directly serving the university’s mission to ensure student career readiness.

The story follows 8-year-old Grace, a child with undiagnosed PTSD who runs away to confront her estranged, violent father and resolve the mystery of her mother’s death. She finds an unexpected mentor in Miss Lonelyheart, an elderly recluse whose handmade “memory light” acts as an emotional portal into the past.

Shot extensively on campus, the film will weave the Auraria displacement history into the atmosphere, rooting the story in CU Denver’s unique heritage. Though it is a deeply personal story, this project will also serve as a vocational engine for CU Denver students, placing them in key creative roles like Director of Photography, Art Director, Sound Designer and Editor to provide real-world mentorship and professional credits.

This project advances CAM’s mission by placing students in key creative roles to ensure career readiness through real-world engagement. It embodies CAM’s values by supporting ‘risktakers’ through an honest, lyrical exploration of trauma. Finally, the project serves as a bridge to the broader film community through strategic festival participation and local industry engagement.

For decades, public administration scholars have considered social equity as a ‘pillar’ of the discipline. However, a lack of clarity around the definition, operationalization, and measure of equity, as well as a disconnect between theory and practice remain as important challenges for equity-centered scholarship. These shortcomings become even more relevant amidst the recent legal, cultural, and political backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion, (DEI) that may impact how public organizations approach their equity-oriented work at the local level. This research will explore these issues in the case of the Denver Mayor’s Office of Social Equity and Innovation (OSEI). The questions that will guide this study are: How is OSEI understanding, operationalizing and trying to advance equity given the current legal, political and cultural context? What are some of the challenges that OSEI currently face to advance equity in the City and County of Denver? Which strategies seem to be working to advance equity at the local level in these turbulent times? To answer these questions, a qualitative case study will be employed to gain a deep understanding of the agency, its current challenges and possible successful strategies. Findings from this work will be the basis for a nationwide collaborative project that will pursue funds from the Russell Sage Foundation to study how Equity Offices across the U.S. can advance their missions at the local level in these turbulent times.

This proposal seeks support for a pilot study examining how PreK-2 teachers conceptualize and enact civic literacies with young children, particularly in relation to migration. When book bans have reached historic highs, divisive concepts legislation restricts equity-focused teaching in 22 states, and migration remains politically charged, teachers seek support to foster belonging but are constrained by limited resources. Early childhood civic education too often becomes reduced to superficial narratives that position immigrant children as passive recipients rather than rights-holders and civic actors.

In Fall 2025 and Spring 2026, we facilitated teacher inquiry groups exploring civic literacies and belonging. This dialogue revealed that early childhood educators face unique challenges and limited resources for teaching civic literacies beyond surface-level diversity celebration. This pilot systematically investigates these challenges through a qualitative survey (N=50), interviews (N=7), and picturebook content analysis (N=15-20), documenting teachers’ practices, constraints, and needs.

This seed grant will produce three deliverables: 1) a scholarly manuscript synthesizing findings across grade levels; 2) a practitioner guide with annotated books and pedagogical strategies; and 3) an external grant proposal to the William T. Grant Foundation or Spencer Foundation. By systematically documenting challenges and needed resources, we translate theoretical proposals into evidence-based frameworks to reduce inequality and foster belonging and civic engagement. This addresses an urgent need: early childhood teachers require support to center children’s civic participation at a time when such work faces unprecedented challenges.

Our innovative, theoretically-grounded, and multi-disciplinary study examines education disparities in psychological well-being (PWB), health, and mortality in two national longitudinal studies: the Health and Retirement Study (ages 50+) and the Midlife in the United States Study (ages 20-75 at baseline). PWB reflects the extent to which people feel happy and satisfied and see themselves as leading meaningful and fulfilling lives and is a central but understudied element of healthy aging. Maximizing wellness (and not merely reducing the share of the population in poor health) is directly aligned with national health priorities articulated in Healthy People 2030. PWB also holds promise for mitigating educational disparities in health and mortality that define the U.S. experience. Understanding changes in PWB throughout midlife and old age is especially important given recent evidence that shows declining levels of wellbeing in the U.S. population, while deaths of despair and loneliness are on the rise. The specific aims (1) use longitudinal data to identify trajectories in PWB across midlife and old age and the ages where education disparities in PWB are growing or closing over time, and (2) identify the ages where education disparities in PWB are most closely associated with incident hypertension, incident diabetes, and mortality. Our R01 proposal to NIH was reviewed on January 23, 2026, receiving an impact score of 36 (29th percentile). Seed funding from RDO will support additional preliminary work and revisions to the R01 proposal that we plan to resubmit for the February 2027 deadline.

Mutations in the mitochondrial intermembrane protein coiled-coil-helix-coiled-coil-helix domain-containing 10 (CHCHD10) are critically linked to the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). While CHCHD10 is known to be essential for maintaining mitochondrial cristae integrity and cellular respiration, the specific structural mechanisms by which its mutations disrupt metabolic pathways remain a significant knowledge gap. This project utilizes recombinant DNA and stable isotope labeling technologies to produce CHCHD10 and its pathogenic S59L mutant for high-resolution analysis.

Building on observations that the protein’s partially disordered nature hinders standard purification and stability, we are designing specialized constructs that isolate structured regions. This strategic approach streamlines the purification process and enables the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to obtain multidimensional structural fingerprints. Furthermore, we characterize the stability and molecular binding affinities of these constructs through Circular Dichroism (CD) and Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC).

By defining how the interactions between secondary structures and protein dynamics influence overall stability, this research aims to illuminate the neurobiological pathways underlying ALS-FTD. Ultimately, this work aligns with CU Denver’s 2030 Strategic Plan Goal 3, propelling the university toward international recognition through impactful contributions to the field of molecular research.

Complex systems such as power grids, wireless networks, and transportation systems involve interactions that vary across different relationship types—requiring multigraphs (graphs with multiple types of edges) for accurate modeling. For example, in power systems, deploying sensors at every node is prohibitively expensive, making efficient signal sampling critical; yet current methods are incomplete and unreliable when applied to multigraph structures. Existing theoretical tools fail to account for simultaneous, non-commutative interactions across edge types, fundamentally limiting our ability to reconstruct information on these structures. This project addresses this gap by developing a rigorous theoretical framework and practical algorithms for optimal sampling on multigraphs.

The PI brings deep expertise in sampling theory, having developed blue-noise sampling strategies for graphs (IEEE TSIPN 2019), characterized optimal sampling sets in graph families (IEEE DSW 2019), and pioneered sampling theory for graphon signals with convergence guarantees (IEEE TSP 2025). Under the PI’s supervision, a graduate student will carry out computational experiments and algorithm implementation while the PI leads theoretical development using non-commutative algebraic structures. The theoretical results will directly contribute to reducing the number of sensors needed for accurate power grid state estimation—a critical bottleneck that forces utilities to rely on sparse, incomplete measurements. These advances will be validated through working software tools; the software serves as the primary vehicle for demonstrating the theoretical contributions, making the two inseparable.

This seed funding will generate proof-of-concept results and validated software necessary to launch a competitive NSF proposal to the EPCN or CPS programs, targeting submission in Fall 2026.

This proposal describes the synthesis, characterization, and study of modified strands of RNA that are able to form unique structures with potential applications as therapeutics and to control the flux of metabolites and ions within in vitro assays, as well as cellular environments. While preliminary data has been gathered, that provides evidence for the success of this proposal, the funds will be used to cement the foundation of the project and publish the work in a top journal in the field. This in turn will substantially increase the probability of obtaining funding from two external sources, specifically The Research Corporation (Cottrell SEED Award) and the National Science Foundation (through the Macromolecular, Supramolecular, and Nanochemistry program, MSN). The manuscript is expected to be submitted during the summer of 2026, which will lead to the preparation of the corresponding grants, with deadlines in March 2026/2027 and October of 2026. In the past decade, my laboratory has focused on exploring structure-function relationships of RNA and it is set up to carry out the proposed research and complete the goals, as delineated within the proposal. This project has not received external funding, thus the need of the requested funds to push to the next level and secure funds. In addition, the project has the potential to become translational and a commercial product, however that focus goes beyond the scope of this proposal.

Ownership and use of public lands have long been contested. However, increasing pressures from growing populations, conflicting stakeholder interests, and environmental impacts are sparking unprecedented conflicts about ownership, protections, and access. Public land issues are making headline news daily. In response, we need reminders of how magnificent our public lands are, how much we cherish them, and what is at stake if we lose them.

Built on swamplands, the urban fabric of New Orleans saw major shifts over the past three hundred years. At the beginning of the 20th century, the large-scale implementation of drainage pumps transformed massive wetlands into buildable areas. Residential neighborhoods such as Broadmoor, Gentilly, and Lakeview emerged between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. The water that was once drained still haunts the houses built on the low land. Heavy rainstorms, hurricanes, and floods are nature’s attempts to restore the manipulated ground plane. In response, flood-prone houses have been elevated by local builders and house owners—using steel beams, hydraulic jacks, and stacked 6x6.

Hot springs, found in mountainous landscapes across the globe, are equal parts cultural and natural phenomenon. Today hot springs are often developed and designed as commercial spas and tourist resorts, although some remain as natural physical settings. Contemporary risks associated with hot springs sites span from geothermal energy plans, to declines of water within the system, to neglect and loss of historic structures and fragile natural settings.

Addressing these concerns, the grant will articulate a research agenda, and produce a detailed precis for two core Landscape Architecture classes (Fall 2026) that comprise a 9 credit immersive studio/seminar experience. Students will catalogue and document selected hot springs sites and assess their geologic and hydraulic properties; explore narratives and ideas attached to these cultural sites; and engage in a project that reimagines how people might sustainably access and utilize hot springs in Colorado. The class will connect with indigenous tribes to explore hot springs on their lands. Hot springs require thoughtful protections and sustainable designs that allow visitors access to these fragile, alluring sites.

The timeliness of this topic in light of climate change, loss of sites, and development pressures affects landscapes around the world affirms capacity for funding of future efforts. Grant products will include all work by the students and faculty; these will inform a body of additional engaged learning experiences, new research, and publications that will address the legacy and potential of Colorado’s hot springs, and direct thinking towards the future environmental and cultural value of hot springs globally.

Pleasure Principle is a dark comedy pilot about a seemingly picture-perfect 20-something teacher’s assistant who begins to unravel after her rabbi boyfriend’s surprise proposal. With pressure mounting from her overbearing psychiatrist parents, destructive habits with sex, drugs, and alcohol resurfacing, and only questionable support from her lifelong best friend, she struggles to hold her life together. The series explores mental health, Jewish identity, and female sexuality with humor and emotional depth.

This project investigates the potential for scaling Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in Colorado, with a focus on how these organizations can grow while maintaining commitments to affordability, community governance, and resident accountability. CLTs provide a unique model for permanent affordability by separating land ownership from homeownership. The research will assess scaling strategies such as portfolio expansion, geographic expansion, and growth in organizational scope, and will analyze their implications for housing stability and community dynamics. A mixed-methods approach will be used, including semi-structured interviews, surveys, and document analysis. Interviews and surveys will capture the perspectives of CLT staff, residents, and partners, while document analysis will provide evidence of organizational structures, policies, practices, and financial models that shape CLT growth and operations.

The Warning Failure Database (“WFD”) project will systematically document instances in which U.S. public warning systems—principally the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless  Emergency Alerts (WEA)—have failed to meet their objectives. ORS seed funding will enable compilation of the initial 50 instances of warning failure from 2015 to 2025 gleaned from media reports, government documents, and research. This proof-of-concept will, ideally, lead to funding for the scaled development of the only comprehensive, public dataset of hundreds of U.S. (and eventually international) instances of warning failure. Although relatively straightforward to assemble from public documents, previous institutional reluctance to catalogue failure has stymied the creation of a similar resource. Journalists tend to treat each new warning failure as a distinct event, overlooking systemic patterns. Therefore, each instance of warning failure added to the WFD will be coded along multiple dimensions (discussed below), and revision of cases will occur as new documentation becomes available. Database queries will permit rigorous analysis of the attributes of warning failure, which responds to an August 2025 Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) rulemaking concerning the modernization of the nation’s alerting systems. Key FCC questions include: What objectives are not being met by current alerting systems? Which entities struggle to originate effective alerts? What kinds of information are omitted or poorly conveyed? By providing stakeholders ongoing, incident-level data via the WFD, this project will supply FCC, policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and citizens with the evidence necessary to improve public warning in the United States and internationally.

Natural gas (NG) pipeline leaks in urban areas are a significant methane source, but bottom-up inventories underestimate emissions due to limited sampling of activity factors (leaks per pipeline length) and emission factors. These parameters vary substantially across cities, making blanket assumptions unreliable. Despite mobile monitoring’s effectiveness for leak detection, it hasn’t been deployed in Denver, Colorado. We propose using the Denver Mobile Monitoring Laboratory (DMML) in a multi-week campaign with an Aeris MIRA Ultra gas analyzer to map methane leaks across Denver. By analyzing methane-to-ethane ratios, we’ll identify which plumes originate from NG leaks versus other sources. Our study will compare Denver’s leak frequency and distribution with other U.S. cities and evaluate emissions rates using two methods: a standard linear model and inverse plume modeling. We’ll generate a comprehensive methane emissions estimate for Denver and compare it with existing inventories. The research will provide methodological guidance for future mobile monitoring studies quantifying methane leak emissions. Results will inform best practices for using mobile platforms to improve emission factor accuracy and support policy decisions. This pilot campaign serves as preliminary work for a planned NSF Career proposal, where the DMML would become a key tool for evidence-based air pollution policy-making. By addressing current inventory limitations and demonstrating mobile monitoring capabilities, this work will advance urban methane emission quantification and support climate mitigation efforts in Denver and beyond.

Heavy-duty trucks are the backbone of U.S. freight movement, but their operations remain inefficient, energy-intensive, and vulnerable to disruptions. While state and federal agencies are planning large-scale freight infrastructure investments, most efforts rely on aggregate assumptions rather than data-driven insights from real-world truck activity. This project leverages a large GPS dataset of short- and long-haul heavy-duty truck operations in Colorado and neighboring states, previously acquired and partially analyzed for a peer-reviewed paper at the 2025 IEEE Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference (VPPC 2025). The next step is to transform this raw data into predictive and adaptive modeling frameworks using deep learning and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. We propose to support one graduate student and one undergraduate student to: (i) preprocess and cluster truck trajectories into representative duty cycles, (ii) train deep learning sequence models to learn temporal patterns such as routes, dwell times, and congestion, and (iii) develop a prototype RL framework where an agent learns when and where to stop to minimize delay and cost under dynamic conditions (e.g., congestion spikes, station outages). Deliverables include a cleaned and annotated dataset, a deep learning sequence model, an RL prototype for scheduling, one peer-reviewed publication submission, and preparation of competitive external proposals. By combining big data analytics, advanced machine learning, and workforce development, this seed grant will generate preliminary results and robust machine learning (ML) that position CU Denver for competitive external funding opportunities such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Infrastructure (ARPA-I), U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), American Automobile Association Traffic Safety Foundation (AAATF), Transportation Research Board’s IDEA program, and the National Science Foundation’s Energy, Power, Control, and Networks (NSF EPCN) program.

Last-mile delivery is the final step in e-commerce order fulfillment. Typically, it is modeled as a vehicle routing problem. Unfortunately, vehicle routing problems are computationally challenging and cannot capture all possible practical considerations. Still, last-mile delivery operators solve vehicle routing problems on a regular basis—daily, hourly, or even by the minute—depending on the set of orders pending fulfillment at any given moment. And every time they do so, they effectively produce a new data point which can be labeled ex post facto with its realized performance upon deployment. In this research, we will develop data-driven methods to learn patterns that are persistent in “good” delivery routes. We will store these patterns in a compact, special-purpose data structure, and we will leverage them to both speed up existing algorithms and to improve their responsiveness to drivers’ route quality feedback.

There has been increased attention on early childhood teachers’ use of exclusionary discipline that removes children from the educational setting; however, little is known about why early childhood teachers use exclusionary discipline practices such as timeout and sending a child to the office instead of proactive discipline approaches and social emotional supports. This project proposes to extend the current sparse literature base by utilizing a mixed methods approach to survey and then interview early childhood teachers regarding their use of exclusionary discipline practices. The use of both quantitative and qualitative data will provide a more complete understanding about why early childhood teachers use certain exclusionary discipline practices in their classrooms. The findings from this project will inform future research and practice-based efforts to train and support teachers in classroom management approaches. We will involve doctoral students in data collection, analysis, and writing. We plan to disseminate the findings in peer-reviewed journal articles and in conference presentations. We will use this project to obtain larger extramural funding from the U.S. Department of Education and/or the Spencer Foundation.

This project will develop a technical framework to enable secure, efficient, and cooperative Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networking across independent operators. The current LEO ecosystem is fragmented, with each operator managing its own infrastructure, leading to inefficient resource use, communication bottlenecks, and limited cross-operator coordination. The research will pursue three thrusts. First, we will design decentralized, enforceable multi-party contract mechanisms that capture both competitive and cooperative interactions, using game-theoretic models and lightweight coordination protocols. Second, we will develop algorithms for bandwidth and energy allocation, distributed task scheduling, and data management to support efficient communication and computation in dynamic satellite networks. Third, we will ensure security and reliability by creating resilient routing protocols, SLA-compliant secure computation models, and secure authentication and key management protocols. The proposed solutions will be evaluated under realistic constraints, including limited onboard resources, mobility, and adversarial conditions. Together, these efforts will lay the foundation for a scalable and trustworthy collaborative satellite ecosystem.

This seed project will generate critical data to support the development of a research proposal aimed at creating a new incremental sheet forming (ISF) technology for continuous fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites with high geometric fidelity and precisely controlled fiber architecture, capabilities not attainable with existing manufacturing methods. ISF progressively deforms sheets along controlled toolpaths and uniquely enables moldless fabrication of metal and plastic shell structures with exceptional design flexibility. CFRPs are critical for a wide range of high performance engineering applications. However, extending ISF to these materials is hindered by a fundamental challenge: inextensible fibers resist the localized deformation required during forming. The proposed ISF technology addresses this barrier by using a thermally curable resin to impregnate continuous fibers when preparing ISF feedstock sheets. During forming, the uncured resin temporarily permits fiber–matrix sliding to accommodate global structural deformation; subsequent thermal treatment cures the resin and locks in robust fiber–matrix bonding. To support technological innovation, an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered modeling framework will be created to efficiently simulate the forming process, predict the mechanical properties of the resulting composites, and enable a reverse-design tool to counteract shear-induced fiber deviation, a critical challenge unique to CFRP forming.

The seed project will focus on three key activities: demonstrating the feasibility of ISF with prepreg fibers, evaluating thermoplastic–epoxy interfacial bonding strength, and validating the reverse-design approach to correct fiber deviation. The data generated will establish technical feasibility, reduce risk, and provide the foundation for a competitive full proposal to external funding agencies.