This year, seven BIG Vision winners across diverse fields received funds of up to $75K to support new research, ranging in topics from wearable haptics integrated into the human body schema (Pedro Lopez) to economic effects of social group heterogenity on policy outcomes (Leonardo Bursztyn) to exploring the Great Pyramid of Giza with cosmic-ray muons (Nadinne Moeller). The one characteristic these projects have in common: their willingness to take ambitious scientific risk.
Executive Director of Research Innovation, Elena Zinchenko says, “We are excited to restart the BIG program with a new cadre of research projects that span from harnessing turbulence to understanding why color perception differs between species. During a very successful pilot phase in 2014-2017, the program funded novel, ambitious research projects across all fields and involved over 300 faculty members, with BIG winners generating dozens of publications and follow up federal funding that exceeded six times the initial BIG grants. This funding opportunity signifies the University’s commitment to supporting the most intellectually and technically challenging ideas at UChicago.”
With investment by BIG, Geneticist Yoav Gilad will investigate new single-cell methods to study embryoid bodies as a potential model of adult human cells—an entirely new concept in the field of Genetics. Chemist Luping Yu seeks to shift the paradigm of our basic understanding of mutual interaction of electrical, optical, and magnetic properties in semiconducting polymers. In Physics, William Irvine sets out to re-vision human thinking around turbulence; Irvine’s research will attempt to harness turbulence to extract pollutant particles from fluids and assemble structures in a controlled manner, thus leveraging its capacity as a resource to de-mix and assemble. Physicist Dam Son will explore the underlying mathematics and create a unified framework behind two separate fields that display striking similarities: active nematics and the fractional quantum Hall effect.
BIG is wholly dedicated to launching ambitious early-stage basic research projects for UChicago faculty. Besides funding, these Vision projects will receive custom support from research strategists from UChicago Research Development Support for the next two years to establish these projects as major research agendas.
This year, BIG also awarded four $15K Seed Awards to invest in early-stage research, from computing signatures of water in Neptune’s interior (Leslie Rogers) to creating physiological and genetic profiles of color perception in birds (Trevor Price). Seed projects have potential for far-reaching human insights, e.g., David Kovar’s project which studies the effects of mechanical forces on actin-binding proteins in cells. Another proposal takes cutting-edge methods like "network autocatalysis" and applies them to historical contexts (e.g., correspondence in Renaissance Florence) to gain new insight relevant to present-day speech and social relationships (John Padgett).
Through BIG seed investments, the UChicago Office of Research and National Labs fosters continued ideation and preliminary results to springboard UChicago’s best new research toward foundations and federal funding frontlines.
