Past Research Initiation Awards
Research Initiation grants are awarded competitively through internal and external review of proposals. These are intended as seed money, are for one year of funding only, and are not renewable through the Consortium. Awardees are required to submit a follow-on proposal to NASA for regular research funding during the year of the grant. The majority of this funding has gone to graduate student support, providing both research and education enhancement simultaneously.
2016
- Assessing a subsurface hydrothermal biosphere in Yellowstone National Park
- Improved geodetic monitoring of tectonic processes at convergent plate boundaries by accounting for Earth’s deformation response to surface mass loading
2015
- Nanoscale Poling and Structuring in Nonlinear Optical Materials
- A real-time computational model and algorithm for vision based detection and tracking of orbital debris: NASA Technology Area 5.7 “Orbital Debris Tracking & Characterization”
2014
- Characterizing Microbial Biofilms in NASA Water Recovery Systems using Micromechanical Tools
- Novel nanostructured ceramic coatings for extreme aerospace applications
2013
- Photoionization of Neutron-Capture Atomic Ions for the Determination of Elemental Abundances in Planetary Nebulae
- Genetics of a novel origin of multicellularity
- Robot fingers: Spatially resolved pressure sensor array based on deformable optical nanostructures
- Derivation of volumetric liquid water content from radar and optical images for permafrost soil mixed with snow cover
- Nuclear magnetic resonance for physical characterization of the liquid vein network in polycrystalline ice.
2012
- Improving Zinc - Air Productivity in Rechargeable Batteries (IZAP-R)
- Disturbance Interactions in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Timeseries analyses of aerial photographs and Landsat satellite imagery
- Environmental controls on abiotic trace gas pro-duction via lowtemperature brine-rock interactions
2011
- Interfacial Stability of Multilayer Nanostructured Thermal and Environmental Barrier Coatings for Aerospace Applications
- Nanostructured optics for high-performance imaging at non-traditional wavelengths
2010
- Hydrologic Modeling at the Watershed Scale Under Climate Scenarios with Dynamic Forest Growth and Competition using Remote Sensing and Field Data
- Snow Near Surface Morphologies and Influence on Solar Albedo
2009
- How low can they grow? Characterization of active microbial metabolism in ice
- Developing Innovative Phylogenetic Methods to Establish the Antiquity of Microbial Processes - The Archeal Domain of Life as a Test Case
- Investigation on utilization of SWEET ontology to support Exploratory Search through NASA's documentation