UC Riverside has awarded approximately $1.2 million through its 2026–27 UCR Research Seed Funding and Grant Program, supporting 32 faculty-led projects designed to spark new discoveries, strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration, and position researchers for future external funding.
The program provides early-stage investments that enable faculty to pursue innovative ideas, generate preliminary data, establish new collaborations, and develop competitive proposals for federal, state, foundation, and industry funding.
The awards are organized into three funding categories.
Pre-Seed Funding Awards
- Developing a Cross-Campus Wellness Hub to Promote Nutrition Literacy and Healthy Lifestyle Habits Among UCR Students [Lead PI: Selene Bobadilla] [Co-PIs: Elisa Cabrera Guzman, Tiffany Tallackson, Jesus Gomez Manzo, and Heidy Roldan]
- Establishing the Inland Empire High-Needs Teacher Pipeline Collaborative [Lead PI: Frances Valdovinos] [Co-PIs: Yvette Hayes, Victor Moreira, Jamal Myrick, Brenda Burgo, Tara Brown, and Raquel Rall]
Small Grant Awards
- The role of structural genomic variation in adaptation to new environments [Lead PI: Kieran Samuk]
- Stabilizing a Fragile Community Archive: The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra [Lead PI: Samuel Lamontagne]
- Testing Significance of Moderator Effects on Multiple Subject Behavior Networks [Lead PI: Jose Sanchez Gomez] [Co-PI: Holly O'Rourke]
- Autism in college students: Research-valid methods for assessment [Lead PI: Jan Blancher] [Co-PI: Katherine Meltzoff]
- Moving the Needle? Leveraging Technology and Employer Education to Improve Fair Chance Hiring [Lead PI: Sharon Oselin] [Co-PI: Justine Ross]
- Resolving the Evolutionary Logic of Niche Engineering via AI-Enhanced Genomics [Lead PI: Allison Hansen] [Co-PI: Patrick Degnan]
- Fluorescent Mark–Release–Recapture Tools for Screwworm Surveillance [Lead PI: Karthikeyan Chandrasegaran] [Co-PIs: Amy Murillo and Benjamin Nyman]
- Sentinel Carnivores at the Urban-Agricultural Interface: A Landscape Approach to Wildlife Health Surveillance [Lead PI: Meredith Vanacker] [Co-PIs: Ellie Armstrong and Laura Plimpton]
- Development of an Analytical Method for Characterizing Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Non‑Exhaust Brake- and Tire-Wear Particulate Emissions [Lead PI: Zisimos Toumasatos]
- You are what you eat: Non-lethal sampling of pollinator diets [Lead PI: Quinn McFrederick]
- The role of estrogen in fatherhood-induced auditory plasticity [Lead PI: Wendy Saltzman] [Co-PI: Khaleel Razak]
- Impacts of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances on Plant-Microbe Interactions of Agricultural Importance [Lead PI: Emma Gachomo]
- Evaluation of cover crops for use in subtropical fruit production agriculture in Southern California [Lead PI: Bodil Cass] [Co-PI: Elizabeth Rowen]
- Ocean’s role in modulating the Hadley cell under climate change [Lead PI: Wei Liu]
- Imaging Hidden Order: Scanning Magnetoelectric Microscopy of Antiferromagnets [Lead PI: Yongtao Cui] [Co-PI: Jing Shi]
- An Interdisciplinary Approach to Controlling Superconductivity and Charge Density Waves in Quasi-1D ZrTe3 Devices [Lead PI: Andrew Joe] [Co-PI: Tamar Mentzel]
- Intelligent Single-Photon Sensing for Next-Generation Dark Matter Detection [Lead PI: Wantong Li] [Co-PI: Shawn Westerdale]
- Chemical and Toxicity Evolution of Thirdhand Tobacco Smoke on Indoor Surfaces [Lead PI: Haofei Zhang]
- Diagnostic and Prognostic Significance of MYC Acetylation in Breast Cancer [Lead PI: Xiaoqian Liu] [Co-PI: Ernest Martinez]
- Piezocatalytic nanoparticle-based ROS neutralizers for osteoarthritis therapy [Lead PI: Jin Nam] [Co-PI: Yadong Yin]
- Detecting Infant Motor Development Through Temporal Modeling of Imbalanced Wearable-Sensor Data [Lead PI: Zhe Fei] [Co-PI: John Franchak]
Seed Funding Awards
- Leveraging the Nasal Mutualist Dolosigranulum pigrum as a Live Mucosal Adjuvant for Live Attenuated Influenza Vaccines [Lead PI: Rong Hai] [Co-PI: Hsiao Ansel]
- The Chronic Disease Assessment and Prevention Hub: An Automated Chronic Conditions Checkup and Prevention Tool for Underserved Populations [Lead PI: Robert Rodriguez] [Co-PIs: Hyle Park, Elizabeth Jacobs, and Suqi Liu]
- Toward an urban earth system observatory [Lead PI: Tamara Harms] [Co-PIs: Kurt Anderson, Francesca Hopkins, Darrel Jenerette, and William Porter]
- Production scale-up of a microbiome-derived biological control agent for mitigation of Huanglongbing in citrus field trials [Lead PI: Caroline Roper] [Co-PI: Philippe Rolshausen]
- Cognitive-Robotic Homeostasis: Optimizing Human-Robot Bidirectional Interaction via Cognitive Workload Modeling [Lead PI: Weiwei Zhang] [Co-PI: Jun Sheng]
- Harnessing AI to Develop the Next Generation of Quantum-Enhanced Gravitational-Wave Observatories [Lead PI: Jonathan Richardson] [Co-PI: Evangelos Papalexakis]
- Inland Empire “Grow Your Own” Education Leader Pathway [Lead PI: Raquel Rall] [Co-PI: Amos Lee]
- Sustainable Monitoring Toward Management of Tire and Road Wear Pollutants [Lead PI: Andrew Gray] [Co-PI: Georgios Karavalakis]
Collectively, this year's funded projects span a wide range of disciplines—including health sciences, artificial intelligence, climate science, engineering, agriculture, education, environmental sustainability, physics, genomics, and the social sciences—reflecting UC Riverside's commitment to fostering interdisciplinary research that addresses regional and global challenges.