The University of Arizona has named six teams as winners of its Big Idea Challenge. Each will receive up to $250,000 over two years in seed money to seek βnovel solutions to grand challenges.β
The six teams of experts include individuals ranging from undergraduate students to senior faculty. The teams presented proposals to βaccelerate transdisciplinary projects with the potential to transform lives, shape policy, drive economic impact and provide training for the next generation of talent,β UA said in a news release.
The new initiative is sponsored by the universityβs Office of Research and Partnerships, and the proposals were judged by a selection panel including Senior Vice President for Research and Partnerships TomΓ‘s DΓaz de la Rubia.
The Big Idea Challenge covers six overarching focus areas: Data, information systems and artificial intelligence; defense and national security; energy and environmental sustainability; the future of health and biomedical sciences; the human experience; and space sciences.
The teams selected βare not only pushing scientific boundaries, they are building solutions with real-world impact for Arizona and the world,β DΓaz de la Rubia said in the news release.
They also showed they have βthe power to attract major external funding.β
The challenge initially received 72 proposals from 19 units across the university, of which 14 were selected to present their proposals in a βventure capital-style pitch eventβ on May 12. The eight of those teams that arenβt awardees will receive $5,000 in seed funding to continue advancing their proposals.
The six winning teams will receive support from UA Research Development Services, Lewis-Burke Associates and Foundation Relations to identify funding opportunities, as well as support for technology transfer and public engagement from Tech Launch Arizona and Tech Parks Arizona.
The teams and their projects are:
β Convergent digital health for remote access: Srikar Adhikari with Vignesh Subbian, Shu Fen Wung, Shravan Guruprasad Aras, Nirav Merchant, Nicole and Lifeng Lin.
β Summoning microbial allies to reduce nitrogen fertilizer dependency in modern agriculture: Mark Beilstein, Rebecca Schomer, Matthew M. Mars and Claire Darnell McWhite.
β Making space for off-Earth scalable cloud computing and data infrastructure: Krishna Muralidharan, Robert Norwood, Karthik Kannan, Roberto Furfaro and Elizabeth Baldwin.
β From early Earth to Mars: βAdvancing an integrated landscape terraformation science of how life transforms planets with a multi-scale collaboratory digital twinning of Biosphere 2:β Scott Saleska, Jennifer L. Croissant, Cristian Roman Palacios, Solange Duhamel and Ken McAllister.
β Heat and health resilience innovation consortium: Amelia Gallitano-Mendel, Freya Spielberg, Kacey Ernst, Heidi Brown and Mona Arora.
β Invest in TIME: βA new $4 million University of Arizona facility poised for global leadership in interdisciplinary earth hazards research:β Charlotte Pearson, Bryan Black, Joe Giacalone, Soumaya Belmecheri and Ashraf Moradi.
The Big Idea Challenge will return in 2027 with a new call for proposals, UA says.
The University of Arizona's Biosphere 2 near Oracle. One of the UA's Big Idea Challenge winners, titled From Early Earth to Mars, is about "the science of how life transforms planets" and will involve a "digital twinning of Biosphere 2."
