2015 CUNY ASRC Joint Seed Program winners announced

More than a dozen faculty from throughout the City University of New York (CUNY) system have been selected as 2015 CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) Seed Grant winners.

The program is a new funding opportunity for CUNY faculty to create research relationships at the ASRC, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research approaches within the five core initiatives at the center: Nanoscience, Photonics, Structural Biology, Neuroscience and Environmental Sciences.

These grants will fund research between CUNY tenured and tenure-track faculty and permanent faculty at the ASRC, and are up to a maximum of $10,000 for a one-year period.

The winners:

Maria Contel, Brooklyn College
“Improving selectivity and delivery of potential organometallic-based cancer chemotherapeutics by using peptide- and carbohydrate- amphiphiles as mobile nanocarriers”

Jean Gaffney, Baruch College
“Structural and Biophysical Characterization of Novel Fluorescent Proteins from Marine Organisms”

Nancy Greenbaum, Hunter College
“Use of 19F-NMR techniques to probe conformational change associated with RNA-protein interaction”

Matthew Johnson, Lehman College
“Optimization and Strategy in Regional Hydroelectric Plant Management and Siting”

Lia Krusin-Elbaum, City College of New York
“Manipulating Surface Plasmons in Topological Insulator Superlattices”

William Latimer, Lehman College
“Assessing the Impact of Green and Rehabilitated Housing on Health in the Bronx, NY”

Syed Mujtaba, Medgar Evers College
“Structure Function Analysis of Transcriptional Coactivator CBP HAT and Ligand CM354”

Eugenia Naro-Maciel, College of Staten Island
“Sequencing New York City’s “Aquanome”: Freshwater environmental DNA in a mosaic of human impact”

Monica Trujillo, Queensborough Community College
“Below-ground diversity of New York City soils”

Raymond Tu, City College of New York
“Microbubble stabilization using self-assembled networks of dipeptide amphiphiles”

Ioana Voiculescu, City College of New York
“Nanogenerator for Energy Harvesting from the Natural Motions of the Heart based on Piezoelectric Nanoribbons”

Brian Zeglis, Hunter College
“89Zr-Labeled Self-Assembled Peptide Amphiphiles for the Non-Invasive PET Imaging of Matrix Metalloproteinase 9 Expression Levels in Aggressive Prostate Cancer”

Shuiqni Zhou, College of Staten Island
“Enzyme triggered assembly of carbon dot-linked carbohydrate and peptide amphiphiles for combination of medical therapy with imaging monitoring”