Photo by Leslie Hawthorne Klingler, Research Development Services
Two College of Humanities professors are among interdisciplinary research teams awarded grants under the University of Arizona’s first Big Idea Challenge.
The initiative, created by the Office of Research and Partnerships, incentivizes transdisciplinary, convergent research teams to incubate ideas, generate new insights, and launch transformative, high-impact projects with the potential for future extramural support.
Matt Mars, Professor and Interim Head of the Department of Public and Applied Humanities, and Ken McAllister, Associate Dean of Research & Program Innovation and Professor in the Department of Public and Applied Humanities, were each on one of the six teams selected. Additionally, College of Humanities researchers were on 12 of the 72 proposals submitted, six of which were semi-finalists and four of which were finalists.
The Office of Research and Partnerships, the new name for the Office of Research, Innovation and Impact, created the challenge to focus on six strategic areas: Defense and National Security, Energy and Environmental Sustainability, The Future of Health and Biomedical Sciences, The Human Experience, Space Sciences, and Data, Information Systems and Artificial Intelligence.
Mars joined a team including Mark Beilstein (School of Plant Sciences), Rebecca Schomer (School of Plant Sciences), and Claire Darnell McWhite (Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology) on the winning project “Summoning Microbial Allies to Reduce Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency in Modern Agriculture.”
McAllister’s winning team includes Scott Saleska (Department Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), Jennifer L. Croissant (School of Sociology), Cristian Roman Palacios (College of Information Sciences), and Solange Duhamel (Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology). The project is “From Early Earth to Mars: Advancing an Integrated ‘Landscape Terraformation Science’ of How Life Transforms Planets with a Multi-scale Collaboratory Digital Twinning of Biosphere 2.”
The selections were based on how well the projects reflected transdisciplinary research that crosses traditional academic boundaries, integrating perspectives from science, engineering, business, social sciences, arts, design and humanities to create holistic solutions to global challenges. In addition, teams needed to illustrate how projects would nucleate teams and ideas and launch high-impact, large-scale research efforts with the power to attract major external funding.
"The teams selected as awardees of the 2025 Big Idea Challenge exemplify the kind of visionary thinking and convergent research that define Arizona’s research enterprise," said Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, senior vice president for research and partnerships. "They are not only pushing scientific boundaries, they are building solutions with real-world impact for Arizona and the world."
The other four projects awarded, are:
- Convergent Digital Health for Remote Access (CoDiRA): Srikar Adhikari (Department of Emergency Medicine) with Vignesh Subbian (Department of Biomedical Engineering), Shu Fen Wung (College of Nursing), Shravan Guruprasad Aras (Center for Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistics), and Nirav Merchant (Data Science Institute).
- Making Space for off-Earth Scalable Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure: Krishna Muralidharan (Department of Materials Science and Engineering), Robert Norwood (Wyant College of Optical Sciences), Karthik Kannan (Eller College of Management), Roberto Furfaro (Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering), Elizabeth Baldwin (School of Government and Public Policy).
- Heat and Health Resilience Innovation Consortium: Amelia Gallitano-Mendel (College of Medicine – Phoenix), Freya Spielberg (College of Medicine – Phoenix).
- Invest in TIME! – a New $4M University of Arizona Facility Poised for Global Leadership in Interdisciplinary Earth Hazards Research: Charlotte Pearson (Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and School of Anthropology), Bryan Black (Tree Ring Lab), Joe Giacalone (Department of Planetary Sciences and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory), Soumaya Belmecheri (Tree Ring Lab), Ashraf Moradi (Department of Planetary Sciences and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory).