SMCM Department of Biology faculty received a combined $1.4 million through three independently awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.
Assistant Professor Abby Beatty, Ph.D., and Visiting Assistant Professor Jacob Botello, Ph.D., in collaboration with former SMCM faculty Daniel Tobiansky, Ph.D., and Jenna Pruett, Ph.D., were awarded an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grant. The project titled: “What’s in a ‘Game’? The use of evolution-based video games to enhance biology education,” received a total of $612,209 to investigate the effectiveness of evolution-based video games in improving student understanding, acceptance, and performance in undergraduate biology courses, with particular attention to equity, student agency, and barriers associated with religious identity. Through this grant, four undergraduate students will be supported each year in research training that includes video game design, data collection and analysis, and participation in the preparation of scholarly publications. Additionally, one postdoctoral researcher will be funded; this position has recently been filled by Josie Otto, Ph.D., who is joining the project from Colorado State University.
Visiting Assistant Professor Christina Goethel, Ph.D., was awarded an NSF Arctic Research Collaborative Grant. This grant is a collaboration between SMCM, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Clark University and the University of Washington, and continues the efforts of the Distributed Biological Observatory program designed for detecting changes from physics to biology in regional hotspots of the Pacific Arctic for another 5 years. The program has been ongoing in its current form since 2010. The project titled “Collaborative Research: The Distributed Biological Observatory (DBO) - A Change Detection Array in the Pacific Arctic Region” received a total of $3.6M, out of which $182,756 was awarded to Goethel at SMCM. Through this grant, one undergraduate student in years 2 and 4 will be funded to either join a two-week-long July research cruise in Alaska or work with data collected from the field and present at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium. This grant has introduced the DBO’s first early-career co-PI (Goethel) and will provide continued, uninterrupted data collection in one of the most rapidly and understudied ecosystems on the planet, the Arctic.
Assistant Professor Lorena Torres-Martínez, Ph.D., was awarded a research grant from the NSF Organismal responses to climate change solicitation. The project is a collaboration between SMCM, the University of Texas, Corpus Christi and the University of South Alabama aimed at understanding how the co-evolution between coastal plants and soil fungi can shape plant responses to increased environmental variation. The project titled: ”Developing a new framework to understand the evolution of specialization in plant-endosymbiont response to varying environments” received a total of $1.1M, out of which $342,188 was awarded to the research laboratory of Torres-Martínez at SMCM. Through this grant, six SMCM undergraduate research assistantships will be funded per year over a period of three years and an SMCM post-doctoral researcher will be funded during the last year of the grant. One of the main end products of the grant will be a public database of the combined marsh plant and fungal genotypes that are resilient to increased environmental variation.
