Research Award Announcements

Ed Kolodziej, Sciences and Mathematics division of SIAS and Center for Urban Waters
MRI:  Acquisition of a LC-High Resolution Mass Spectrometer for Characterization of Environmental Organic Contaminants
National Science Foundation (NSF)

Hundreds of thousands of anthropogenic chemicals are produced and used in modern societies; yet most of these have almost no data available on their environmental fate and toxicity.  With so many potential environmental pollutants, high throughput and analytical capacity are critical limiting factors to research effectiveness. Because of the richness, depth and breadth of their data, suspect and non-target screening techniques employing high resolution mass spectrometry have now become key methodologies for environmental chemistry and engineering studies. Therefore, we seek to acquire a cutting-edge high-resolution mass spectrometer to identify, quantify, and source apportion emerging/unknown chemical pollutants in surface water, stormwater, drinking water, wastewater and biological tissue sample types. This instrument will be housed at the Center for Urban Waters. Our research team seeks to further develop cutting-edge expertise in environmental chemistry and engineering, especially suspect and non-target screening for chemical source control and treatment system optimization. 

Alison Gardell, Sciences and Mathematics Division of SIAS    
Collaborative Research: NSF-BSF: Somatic cell adaptation towards immortalization in a marine tunicate
National Science Foundation (NSF)

This project investigates the conditions and gene regulatory/ proteome networks that promote cell proliferation, counteract senescence, and induce somatic cell immortalization in the marine tunicate Botryllus schlosseri. Primary cultures of haemocytes and epithelial monolayers have been established for this species. They will be investigated to learn how (1) environmental factors (media supplements and attachment substrates), (2) stress-induced evolution, (3) synthetic biology
(manipulation of pro- and anti-proliferative genes), and (4) cell fusion technology alter cellular proliferation and senescence and the underlying molecular phenotypes (gene regulatory/ proteome networks). The goal is to a) understand the sequence of molecular events that promotes cell proliferation and inhibits senescence in vitro and b) to generate the first cell line for any marine invertebrate. This new collaboration integrates expertise in marine invertebrate cell culture, B. schlosseri culture, isolation of marine invertebrate stem cells, and cell fusion methodology (Rinkevich) with experience in fish cell immortalization (Gardell, Kültz), transcriptomics (Gardell), stress-induced evolution, synthetic biology, molecular phenotyping by proteomics, and network analyses of complex molecular phenotypes (Kültz).

Yan Bai, School of Engineering and Technology                              
GenCyber Tacoma:  University of Washington Tacoma 2019 GenCyber Camp for Middle School Students 
National Security Agency (NSA)

GenCyber Tacoma hosts two separate one week-long, non-residential student camps that will engage a diverse spectrum of urban youth in the sciences and arts of cybersecurity. While the UW Tacoma campus will host one camp, the second camp will take place at Franklin Pierce Keithley Middle School. UW Tacoma will utilize its well-established recruitment platforms and close partnership with Franklin Pierce Schools to target middle school students to engage 50 eighth and ninth grade students from demographic groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields. In time, we
hope to expand this program to provide additional offerings to elementary and high school students.  We look forward to a gradual expansion into other nearby school districts, throughout Pierce County and into southern King County, including Federal Way, Kent and Renton. Through culturally responsive, hands-on and project-based pedagogy; youth will learn Cybersecurity First Principles, gain cybersecurity knowledge and skills, learn online safety practices and privacy techniques and will develop foundational knowledge of ethical use of technology and ultimately increase their interest in pursuing cybersecurity education and careers.

Andy James, Center for Urban Waters     
City of Tacoma and UWT, Wapato Lake Stormwater Treatment Project
City of Tacoma/Washington State Department of Ecology

The City of Tacoma has taken and continues to take actions to reduce stormwater-related phosphorus impacts to Wapato Lake. As part of this ongoing effort the city has undertaken a Wapato Lake Stormwater Treatment project to evaluate treatment options to reduce and remove phosphorus from Wapato Lake in an effort to further improve water quality. UWT has knowledge and expertise to study and evaluate treatment options to reduce and remove stormwater-related phosphorus impacts to Wapato Lake. Therefore, the city has determined that UWT is highly qualified to provide a thorough evaluation of various stormwater treatment options to reduce and remove such impacts, and further that UWT’s proximity to the city within the Center for Urban Waters building facilitates informal opportunities to consult and collaborate frequently on such treatment evaluation, which benefits the Wapato Lake Stormwater Treatment project.

Wesley Lloyd, School of Engineering and Technology    
Accessible Cloud-Based Multi-Omic and Imaging Analysis for the Cancer Research Data Commons the Cancer Research Data Commons
BioDepot LLC/National Institutes of Health (NIH)

This project is led by a grant submission by BioDepot LLC in response to the NIH National Cancer Institute SBIR contract Topic 428 proposal. The overarching goal of this project is to develop cloud-based analytical tools for multi-omics and imaging data for the cancer research community. In particular, investigators will build on their previous work, the Biodepot-workflow-builder (Bwb), a user-friendly graphical platform for building and executing bioinformatics workflows in the cloud. They will enhance the Bwb to provide a front-end to allow cancer researchers to easily access databases from the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC), and analyze multi-omics and imaging data using customizable cloud-based workflows from a curated repository.

Ander Erickson, Science and Mathematics Division, SIAS
CAREER: Supporting Undergraduate Students' Self-Directed Use of Online Resources in Lower-Division Mathematics Classes
National Science Foundation

UW Tacoma Assistant Professor Ander Erickson has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The nearly $700,000 grant will allow Erickson the chance to learn more about how college students use online resources in so-called “gateway” mathematics courses. The grant is part of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development or CAREER program, which supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. It is the first such NSF grant made to a UW Tacoma faculty member.

Featured on the UW Tacoma website, learn more about this project here.

Juhua Hu, SET
Rare Event Prediction in Time Series
National Science Foundation

Predicting rare/extreme events within a time series is a critical task in a broad range of applications. For entities that administrate and manage computer networks, it is critical that they have the ability to anticipate when the number of queries being received by their servers will spike to an abnormally high amount. In the event that the number of network resources allocated is not sufficient to service the amount of traffic, the server can be rendered unresponsive and becomes susceptible to failure and security breaches. For the health care industry, it is also invaluable to predict when a hospital may receive an influx in the number of patients visiting, which may bring the facility to capacity. Otherwise, it is disastrous for hospitals as it can lead to longer waiting times, longer shifts for staff, and even death. However, rare/extreme events are often anomalies within a time series that are characterized by having comparatively small or large value and occur extremely infrequently. Therefore, this is a challenging problem because of the non-linear nature of these rare events, the inability to capture key information about the rare events in the systematic components of the temporal data, and the data imbalance between rare and normal events. Apparently, rare event prediction in time series is an important yet challenging problem. To the best knowledge, only a few works in the literature discussed this problem and the problem is not well studied.  Therefore, the goal of this project is to investigate this problem and research potential solutions to address the above-mentioned challenges.

John Finke, Sciences and Mathematics Division - SIAS 
A portable biosensor for measurement of Covid-19 antibodies in community testing
M J Murdock Charitable Trust

This is a collaborative effort to develop a portable biosensor for measurement of Covid-19 antibodies in community testing.  Murdock partner and high school teacher, Sarah Kaperick, will assist in critical stages of biosensor development enabling rapid quantitative point-of-care measurement of Covid-19 antibodies. This biosensor uses our "calibration free" microfluidic technology to improve sensitivity, specificity, and quantitative capability versus the numerous rapid tests on the market. The biosensor sensitivity and quantitative capability will be confirmed using a control antibody that targets the Covid-19 spike protein. The biosensor specificity will be assessed using a range of antibody preparations collected prior to the emergence of Covid-19. In collaboration with local biotech RAIN Incubator and Multicare, the optimized biosensor will be tested with set of confirmed positive and negative COVID-19 serum samples.

Ka Yee Yeung-Rhee, SET
A Precision Health Trial to Reduce Illness & Promote Resilience in Hospital Staff
The Geneva Foundation/Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

The goal of the proposed research is to provide evidence-based health and wellness guidelines to military treatment facility (MTF) healthcare staff to mitigate the risk of respiratory infections. Staff adoption of these educational guidelines will include assessment of biological/health risk parameters as well as measures of lifestyle behaviors, such as sleep, diet/nutrition and physical activities. Multiple datasets will be collected in this study, including gene expression data, clinical parameters and data from wearable fitness devices.

Matthew Tolentino, SET
Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Without the Global Positioning System (GPS)
Namatad/US Department of Defense (DOD)

The use of GPS has become ubiquitous for position identification and navigation. However, in many areas, such as within buildings, dense urban areas, complex terrain, or hostile environments, access to satellite-transmitted positioning signals may be limited, unavailable, or intentionally denied, limiting the spatial awareness and navigation capabilities of personnel in transit. To ensure continuity in navigation capabilities, alternative localization techniques are required to avoid personnel and assets from becoming lost or disoriented while traversing unknown areas.
In this proposal, the project team will implement and evaluate the changes identified during Phase I for adapting the Namatad FIREFLY localization platform for operational use by warfighters in GPS-denied areas. Project work focuses on realizing implementations of the optimizations and changes recommended during our feasibility analysis during Phase I. These include L2 network adaptations, modifications for large-scale deployments, transceiver optimizations and ranging adaptations for urban environments, and integration of jamming resilience techniques. The outcome of this project will be a ready-to-deploy, defense-focused version of the FIREFLY system for USSOCOM.

Katie Haerling, School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership
Responding to a critical and urgent need: Informing evidence-based regulation of simulation in pre-licensure registered nursing education
The National Council of State Boards of Nursing

To protect the public, state boards of nursing (BONs) aim to develop and enforce evidence-based regulations (Spector et al., 2020). In recent years, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, BONs have closely examined regulations related to the use of simulation in nursing education. Limited numbers of traditional clinical placement sites and restrictions around what student nurses can do during traditional clinical experiences often create less-than-ideal learning opportunities for undergraduate registered nursing students. At the same time, advances in technology and evidence supporting the use of simulation in undergraduate registered nursing education have led nurse educators to question how much traditional clinical experience can be replaced with simulation without impacting educational outcomes, what types of simulation are most effective, and what ratio is most appropriate for “counting” these hours. This project systematically addresses these questions by examining the use of mannequin-based simulation, virtual simulation, and traditional clinical in undergraduate registered nursing education. Findings from this study will provide critical insights to inform regulatory decisions about how to most appropriately calculate required clinical experience hours, including time spent in traditional clinical, mannequin-based simulation, and virtual simulation experiences.

Alison Gardell, Sciences and Mathematics Division - SIAS 
Alaska Undergraduate Research Experience: Partnering for Alaska Students by Growing Recruitment and Retention through Undergraduate Research
University of Alaska, Anchorage/National Science Foundation (NSF)

The main goal of AK UNiTE (Alaska UNdergraduaTe research Experience) is to connect Alaskan students to local research opportunities in biological sciences to increase retention and better prepare students to enter research endemic to Alaska. This project will bring the Alaskan research community together to develop community partnerships with local research projects (e.g. local tribal councils, non-profits, state and federal agencies across Alaska) and create pathways for future undergraduate research opportunities.  This project will identify community partnerships with local research projects, provide workshops on Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) development and place-based education for collaborators, develop a network informational hub within the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) website, and evaluate the network. 

Heather Dillon, SET
Building an Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) Concept Map Toolbox for Course and Program Evaluation
Rowan University/Kern Family Foundation

The goal of this project is to create a toolkit for faculty members to allow them to use a “master EM” concept map as a means for scoring student generated EM concept maps and assessing student progression over different time periods. Concept maps are considered to be a direct assessment tool as they can provide a snapshot of students’ conceptual understanding of EM at a specific time point. Concept maps have been used extensively as teaching and assessment tools for other engineering education
outcomes. Both quantitative and qualitative scoring approaches have been tested and validated in other areas but need more work for EM assessment.

Ed Kolodziej, Sciences and Mathematics Division – SIAS and Center for Urban Waters
Coho Toxicant Characterization
Washington State Department of Ecology/Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Over several years of effort together, UW and WSU research groups have recently discovered a new chemical in roadway runoff that is apparently responsible for the acute mortality observed in coho salmon in stormwater-impacted watersheds throughout the Puget Sound basin. The chemical is toxic to juvenile coho salmon at concentrations near or below 1 μg/L. They expect to detect this toxic chemical in all receiving waters downstream of busy roadways (hereafter referred to as the “toxicant”). Notably, this chemical is a transformation product; it is derived from the reaction of an antioxidant ‘parent’ chemical that the literature implies is added to all vehicle tires (hereafter referred to as the “parent compound”). While this new chemical and its suspected provenance have been identified, considerable research is needed to characterize its environmental transport and fate, and the toxicity that it induces in coho salmon and other species relevant to Washington State waters. Ongoing research efforts are expected to result in the quantification of this toxic chemical by a Washington Department of Ecology accredited method and a basic understanding of its occurrence and fate in select stormwater treatment systems. However, there still exists a considerable lack of insight into the effect of solution conditions (pH, ionic strength, turbidity, dissolved organic matter) and hydrology on the stability, transport, and toxicity of this chemical. The objective of this research project is to continue to research the characteristics and potential impacts of these compounds on the Puget Sound ecosystem.

Maria-Tania Bandes-Becerra Weingarden, Culture, Arts, and Communications (CAC)-SIAS 
Book of Andy
City of Tacoma

The artistic merit of the production of The Book of Andy is three-fold. First, the arts in Tacoma, like the rest of the country, have taken a brutal hit. Artists in general are out of work and further, theatre artists have lost the ability to have their work produced in the traditional sense. This production brings together two organizations, with the support of a third, to create a virtual space to perform, while providing a number of artists in the community the ability to earn while practicing their craft. Cast will be made up of community members and students.
Second, both UWT and Dukesbay are committed to produce work from underrepresented groups and embrace diverse casting as their practice. The Book of Andy depicts a Latinx queer young man as its protagonist and explores issues unequivocally relevant to the LGBTQ+ community. Both the Latinx community and the LGBTQ+ communities have been historically underrepresented on the Tacoma stage, a contrast to recent statistical data demonstrating the growth of the Latinx community, up to 12%, and the steady growth of the LGBTQ+ community in Tacoma, an area often described as Washington’s “gayest” city. Visibility is important. 
Last, this production is positioned as the only production UWT will produce this academic year, providing a much-needed training ground for future theatre artists that will eventually come from UWT, and more importantly, future theatre goers that will be eager for the live theatre experience in Tacoma in the future, when the pandemic allows us to once again enjoy entertainment face to face.

Congratulations to Larry Knopp, SIAS Professor Emeritus, who is leading an NSF funded project titled Examining Shifting Geographies of Historically Underrepresented Groups with co-PIs Dr. Michael Brown, UWS Geography Professor, and Dr. Bo Zhao, UWS Geography Assistant Professor.  This 3-year project started in May 2020 and is being administered by UW Seattle’s Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology. 

This project aims to construct, analyze, and make publicly available a geographically extensive, longitudinal data set of LGBTQ spaces in the U.S. The data set will be compiled from a purposive sample of annual entries (1965-2014) in the only extant annually published national-scale source listing LGBTQ venues since the mid-twentieth century (Bob Damron’s Address Book, later known as The Damron Men’s Travel Guide – published annually since 1965 – and its companion, the Damron Women’s Traveler – published annually since 1990). The data will then be analyzed spatio-temporally using spatial statistics and GIS. Specifically, the project team will analyze and visualize shifting locational patterns of entries by city, state, and region; changes in the entries themselves (including the appearance and disappearance of particular entries, types of entries, and descriptions); and relationships between these.

Congratulations to Michael Honey, SIAS Professor, who was named a 2020-21 Fellow in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.   Radcliffe

Fellows are exceptional scientists, writers, scholars, public intellectuals, practitioners, and artists whose work is making a difference in their professional fields and in the larger world.

As a Radcliffe Fellow, Dr. Honey will write “They Never Can Jail Us All: A Personal History of Repression, Resistance, and the Freedom Struggle,” tracing his experiences as a conscientious objector to war in the 1960s and an organizer in the Southern freedom movement from 1970 through 1976. Honey will research the newly-accessioned files of Angela Davis in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, as well as civil liberties and rights records at the Wisconsin Historical Society. He will also use Freedom of Information Act surveillance records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1970, it placed him on its “security index” to be arrested, along with thousands of other civil rights and anti-war activists, during a declared national emergency. This is a book project developed partly at UW Tacoma with Mary Gates Scholarship winner Casey Reynolds Wagner, undergraduate researcher.

Congratulations to Ruben Casas, SIAS Assistant Professor and Anaid Yerena, Urban Studies Assistant Professor who are co-leading a project funded through UW’s Urban@UW Research Spark Grant program titled “How Dislocation Impacts Civic Engagement in Parks and Greenspaces.”  
This project seeks to understand the impact of dislocation, a term used here to capture the experiences of people impacted by long commute times, on civic engagement. The PIs posit that long commute times correlate with decreased civic engagement as people have less time to encounter others in public space. In this project, they ask: how does dislocation impact whether, when, and how people use neighborhood parks and green spaces to engage with others in the community? Currently, many U.S. households experience dislocation as commute times have grown generally across the U.S. in the past 20 years. As people spend more time commuting they spend less time on leisure. This redistribution of time impacts the use of parks and green spaces even in regions in which there are abundant and high-quality ones. This project will measure just how much of an impact dislocation has on park use in the Central District of Tacoma, Washington.  

Wei Cheng, School of Engineering and Technology             
Smart Street Parking Assistant
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Finding street parking in big cities is challenging. Even more, street parking could be expensive (ticketed/towed) due to the misunderstanding of the street parking signs, which can be very complex to read and understand. Most of the existing parking apps are for garage parking. The needs of street parking were not well served. Although some cities’ DOTs provide street parking information like Seattle, the information may be obsolete. Moreover, entities other than DOT can also post their street parking signs; and different cities have different styles of street parking signs. In addition, drivers need more information for safety/comfortability than just allowed parking time and parking prices when they park in unfamiliar places. Therefore, there is still no one-for-all solution for street parking. The outcome of this project are two products: One is an App via which users can know how long they can park at a street parking spot by simply taking a picture of the signs. The other is the APIs for automobile manufacturers and Map/Navigation services providers, who can use the API for smart parking, route planning, and autonomous cars. Our solution can provide features such as convenience, economy, no parking ticket, no confusion, safe street parking guidance, worry-free, and trip planning. This project will be undertaken by a team of female entrepreneurs and minorities.

Christine Stevens, School of Nursing and Healthcare Leadership            
Urban Universities and Food Insecurity During a Pandemic
The Coalition of Urban Serving Universities and the Kresge Foundation
The Coalition of Urban Serving Universities is hosting a collaborative research-based exploration that lifts up the experience of urban universities as leaders in basic needs delivery. Urban universities have demonstrated that they can innovate and adapt quickly to address and solve for basic needs in their communities. Because of their leadership in this area, grantees are primed to answer these and other questions:

• How is the pandemic changing basic needs innovations at institutions?

• How are universities articulating the student success impact of basic needs on students?

• What will basic needs look like in the fall and beyond? How do universities prepare for this?

• How does institutional racism differentially impact certain populations’ access to basic needs?

• What future directions should be explored? What areas are ripe for innovation?

The project will culminate in a publication (or multiple publications) which will include steps universities can take to ensure their student success efforts are addressing basic needs in an equitable manner, and provide insight to philanthropic organization as to how they can support universities in this effort.

Andy James, Center for Urban Waters                               
Effects based Characterization of Chemicals in Puget Sound Biota
Washington State Department of Ecology/Environmental Protection Agency
Humans are discharging a wide range of contaminants into receiving waters, with many of them being poorly characterized.  According to a recent global survey, over 350,000 chemicals and chemical mixtures are utilized worldwide with a large fraction of them lacking even basic descriptions (Wang et al.2020).  Many of these chemicals may affect the health of exposed species, leading to altered reproduction or affecting fitness and ability to survive.  To better understand and manage pollutant loadings to aquatic ecosystems, we will survey water and biota from a range of sites to understand occurrence, sources, exposures, and potential impacts.  The project will investigate the occurrence and impacts of trace organic contaminants on aquatic biota through three approaches: 1) optimize methods for chemical recovery and identification utilizing mass spectrometry approaches, 2) identify source-specific chemical tracers in water and tissues for source apportionment and exposure characterization, and 3) measure and evaluate the relations between chemical uptake and metabolic responses of organisms in controlled and field exposure scenarios.

Debasis Dawn, School of Engineering and Technology                 
Chip-based ADS-B for High Density, Low Altitude UAV Operations
KalScott Engineering Inc./National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
In collaboration with KalScott, Professor Debasis Dawn will continue development of a chip-based ADS-B for high-density, low-altitude UAV operations in the national airspace. This effort consists of designing and fabricating a multi-band transceiver chip that can provide ADS-B functionality. In addition, the chip will also have the ability to port vehicle data into other formats for dissemination over multiple bands. During this Phase II process, the components of this chip will be developed and tested individually, and then integrated into a final design as a single chip. This will be tested in the lab, on the ground in a moving vehicle, and finally in flight on a small UAV.