- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

Largest NSF Grant Awarded to ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Will Support Ongoing Undergraduate STEM Education Efforts

John Hill — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 13:05:40 +0000

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has been awarded a nearly $2 million grant from the (NSF) to enhance teaching and learning and to promote student success in undergraduate STEM education. This is the largest grant ��Vlog��ý Little Rock has ever received from the National Science Foundation. The $1,999,986 five-year grant from the NSF will be used to provide support for faculty and students in the Donaghey College of STEM with a specific focus on supporting students from historically underserved groups. The researchers will use the grant, “NSF IUSE Institutional and Community Transformation Level II: Upholding Active Learning Reform in STEM,” to grow the use of evidence-based teaching practices to increase student engagement and retention in undergraduate STEM education. “A strong STEM workforce is critical for our country,” said Dr. Lawrence Whitman, dean of the Donaghey College of STEM. “To build and sustain a strong STEM workforce, we must educate students for next-generation careers. To properly educate these students, we must transform our education. I am beyond pleased to see that this funding will continue the excellent work of our faculty. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation and their support of this transformational project.” The interdisciplinary team led by Dr. Mark Baillie, assistant professor of chemistry, is a collaboration with faculty from the STEM Education Center (Dr. Michael Moore, director of undergraduate research and mentoring), the School of Education (Dr. Lundon Pinneo, assistant professor) and the Office of the Provost (Dr. David Montague, associate vice chancellor for student success). Ronia Kattoum, an advanced instructor of chemistry and Ph.D. student in applied sciences-chemistry, is working as the project’s graduate assistant. “Our main focus is to increase the number of underserved students who successfully complete STEM courses,” Pinneo said. “We want to identify current barriers for faculty and improve support systems so campus-wide we can close the equity gap.” Students from historically underserved populations, first-generation students, and Pell Grant recipients are likely to encounter barriers to their success in their lecture-based STEM courses. Baillie says that traditional teaching methods are often a barrier to students reaching their potential. “People’s journeys through education are very different,” Baillie said. “If you can create a classroom environment that gives everyone the opportunity to engage, then everyone will learn and progress.” To support faculty members as they learn about and adopt more student-centered and inclusive teaching strategies, ��Vlog��ý Little Rock will utilize successful NSF-funded interventions including the expansion of the Mobile Institute on Scientific Teaching (MoSI) and the Learning Assistant Program in the Donaghey College of STEM. Currently, ��Vlog��ý Little Rock is the only higher education institution in Arkansas with these two highly successful programs that focus on faculty and student success. The grant builds upon the previous success of these programs by allowing many more faculty and students within the Donaghey College of STEM to participate in these initiatives.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock teaching assistants and professors participate in the Mobile Institute on Scientific Teaching workshop. Photos by Ben Krain.

“��Vlog��ý Little Rock has a rich history in the STEM area, with innovative programming for faculty as well as major initiatives focused on student success,” Montague said. “This funding will certainly help promote the future of STEM education in Arkansas.” MoSI workshops focus on active learning and other evidence-based teaching practices. Research on teaching and learning shows that students are 1 ½ times more likely to pass classes in active learning classrooms than in traditional lectures. Prior to receiving this grant, about 20 percent of ��Vlog��ý Little Rock faculty completed the weeklong workshop on their own time. The grant will reward future faculty to participate in the workshop by providing a $500 stipend for 75 STEM faculty members to complete the workshop over the next five years. Starting in the spring 2023 semester, faculty will be recruited to join the first cohort of participants. The grant also provides a $975 stipend for 605 students to participate in the Learning Assistant Program. The assistants will provide peer learning support for more than 9,000 of their classmates over the five years of the grant. The stipends will allow greater access for many students who previously couldn’t afford to volunteer for this leadership role. By the end of the project, ��Vlog��ý Little Rock plans to support approximately 250 learning assistants per year. Further opportunities will be provided for faculty who have successfully completed the MoSI workshop to improve their teaching skills. The researchers will form Communities of Practice – small groups of up to five faculty members who will meet bi-weekly to offer peer support and build out their expertise. Faculty who participate will each receive stipends of $1,000. The grant will also fund one graduate student and one postdoctoral researcher for five years, as well as a series of speakers that will focus on implementing student-centered practices. ��Vlog��ý Little Rock will also create a Community of Transformation annually for faculty members who have participated in the Communities of Practice. This group of 10 change agents will discuss and plan efforts to enact policy changes focusing on student success and closing the student equity gap. The grant also provides up to $5,000 a year for five years for faculty and administrators in the Donaghey College of STEM to implement ideas that emerge from the Community of Transformation. “We want to emphasize how the departments and programs are encouraging their own teachers,” Moore said. “This is a multi-prong approach by the whole university on how to support a successful culture of teaching. It speaks to the credibility of the support we have across the university and from our partners. This is a win for ��Vlog��ý Little Rock.” Caption: ��Vlog��ý Little Rock professors, from left, Mark Baillie, Ronia Kattoum, Michael Moore, David Montague, and Lundon Pinneo are working on a National Science Foundation project to improve undergraduate education in the Donaghey College of STEM. Photo by Ben Krain.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock Postdoctoral Researcher Receives $40K Grant to Create Predictive Modeling of Refugee Numbers

John Hill — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 14:43:17 +0000

The , using flow-through funding from the National Science Foundation, has awarded a postdoctoral research fellow at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock a grant worth more than $40,000 to create a machine learning model to predict refugee counts in the United States. Dr. Esther Mead recently graduated from ��Vlog��ý Little Rock with a Ph.D. in integrated computing with an emphasis in information quality. She is currently serving as a postdoctoral research fellow at the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock (COSMOS) in the Department of Information Science. “I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge my gratitude towards my mentor and now colleague Dr. Nitin Agarwal, who has helped me in innumerable ways,” Mead said. “Suffice it to say that without his mentorship and support, my road would be a lot rockier; he is truly a gift to many.” In 2020 and 2021, refugees driven from their homelands have exponentially grown from a number of crises across the world. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 82.4 million people fled their homes in 2020 due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and events that seriously disturb public order. To conduct this study, Mead will develop a dataset of different sociocultural, socioeconomic, and economic metrics from countries of refugee origin. This robust set of data will be curated into a unique prediction model that will help researchers and policy makers understand the factors that compel human migration and refugee crisis situations. This project is funded by the Data Analytics that are Robust and Trusted (DART) program from the Arkansas Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) initiative from the National Science Foundation. This project is Mead’s first grant-funded project. “The award of this DART grant represents my success in making it through the door in the first step to realizing the fruition of one of my heart’s desires, which is to begin creating a continual funding stream for a program involving this and other important research,” Mead said. Mead wants to use this new opportunity to collaborate with students and other research fellows at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock and other institutions on new research endeavors involving big data and predictive research modeling. “Ultimately, my goals include achieving the ability to hire an increasingly larger number of ��Vlog��ý Little Rock students, as well including postdoctoral research fellows and professors as co-principal investigators in order to advance collaboration in research both within and across institutions and across academic disciplines,” she said. This story was written by Lydia Perry in the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock Receives Nearly $325,000 NSF Grant to Shine Light on Muslim Hate Crimes in Arkansas

John Hill — Wed, 05 May 2021 20:00:29 +0000

Two criminal justice professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock have been awarded a $324,987 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund a three-year program to study anti-Muslim sentiment and Muslim hate crimes in Arkansas. Dr. Tusty ten Bensel, director of the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology, and Dr. Robert Lytle, the graduate coordinator for the school, will examine the context and incidence of anti-Muslim sentiment, ranging from prejudice to hate crimes. The study will focus on the perceptions of Muslims in Arkansas who have been the target of discrimination, harassment, or interpersonal crime, along with the impacts such behaviors have on victims. The NSF grant also includes funding for 30 undergraduate students to participate in the design, implementation, analysis, and reporting of this project. Students who are interested in criminal justice and graduate education will be selected from a nationwide pool of applicants to work with ��Vlog��ý Little Rock criminal justice faculty members on this project beginning in summer 2022. The program will run for three eight-week summer sessions. In the first year, students will learn how to conduct research and interview 15-30 Muslims in the community on their experiences of hate crimes in Arkansas. Interviewees must be 18 and older and a resident of the state for at least six months. In the second year, students will distribute surveys to a larger Muslim population in the state. In the final year, they will interview policy makers and law enforcement about hate crime legislation. “It’s important to understand the scope and contributing factors to a problem when coming up with strategies to address the problem. We hope that this project will help identify the manner in which bias-motivated crime emerges in Arkansas to help efforts by law enforcement and policymakers to protect the Muslim community,” Lytle said. “This is in addition to promoting community cohesion and improved relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim community in Arkansas.” The goal of this project is to help criminal justice students gain a deeper understanding of the scope and magnitude of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the state. “One of the purposes of this study is to understand the nature and extent of anti-Muslim sentiments and hate crimes in Arkansas, but it is also to help victims understand that their anti-Muslim experiences and victimization are important to report to the authorities and are not experiences that should be tolerated by any members of a group,” ten Bensel said. “The outcome of this project could have a number of practical and policy implications. It will raise awareness of anti-Muslim hate crimes and the obstacles to social integration, reporting, and seeking support after experiencing anti-Muslim hate crimes. The larger study will inform avenues for improving the relationship between the criminal justice system and Muslim community.” This project is funded by the National Science Foundation under award number 2050161. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are of those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock receives NSF grant to host free virtual cybersecurity camp

John Hill — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 21:43:11 +0000

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received a grant from the National Science Foundation that will allow students in grades 7-12 to attend a virtual cybersecurity summer camp in July for free. The camp is held in partnership with Virtual Arkansas and the . They will host four sessions from 9-11:30 a.m. and 1-3:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday on July 6-9 and July 13-16. The afternoon camp from July 6-9 is full, but registration is available for the other three sessions. “The camp will cover topics such as ransomware, mobile forensics, firewalls, and how to detect a cyberattack and what to do about it,” said Sandra Leiterman, managing director of the Cyber Gym. “Each day, we’ll have a guest speaker who will talk about cybersecurity careers in areas like information technology, government, and the FBI.” Guest speakers will include Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, a member of the FBI’s mobile forensics team, a cybersecurity director for an Arkansas government agency, and a chief information security officer. The camp will end with a hackathon where students will show off the skills they learned throughout the week. In order to participate, students will need a computer with reliable internet access, a school-affiliated email address, a headset with a built-in microphone, and a webcam. The grant from the National Science Foundation also provides funding for the Cyber Gym to enhance undergraduate cybersecurity curriculum with security content, improve recruitment and retention of computer science and information technology students in the cybersecurity workforce, enhance faculty expertise in security competitions and skills, and increase students’ knowledge and skills in cybersecurity. For more information and to register, .

Center Creates Accelerator to Help Arkansas Entrepreneurs Get Early-Stage Federal Innovation Funding

��Vlog��ý Little Rock — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 14:41:35 +0000

The Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center is launching a new accelerator to help more early-stage Arkansas companies tap into SBIR, the highly competitive federal Small Business Innovation Research funding program. Also known as America’s Seed Fund, SBIR and its sister, Small Business Technology Transfer, annually award $2.5 billion in grants and contracts to small firms to pursue the commercial potential of innovative technologies. Companies seeking SBIR funding typically apply multiple times before succeeding. Only were funded in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available. ASBTDC’s new Lab2Launch Accelerator will offer step-by-step guidance on every aspect of preparing and submitting a robust SBIR proposal. Led by the center’s Rebecca Todd and Martial Trigeaud, participants will get help with topic selection, budget preparation, writing and editing, market research and more. “Through SBIR, entrepreneurs can build businesses around their scientific passions and get the funding they need to develop cutting-edge products and technologies,” said State Director Laura Fine. “We want to see more SBIR applicants and winners from Arkansas and believe the Lab2Launch Accelerator is a way to accomplish that.” Separate six-week cohorts will focus on different federal agencies. The first will begin in January and focus on the National Institutes of Health. A National Science Foundation cohort will follow in March. To give companies based anywhere in the state an opportunity to take part, they may attend sessions virtually or in person. There is no application fee or cost to participate. To apply, visit . Spots are limited, so interested companies are encouraged to apply early. L2L-Accel is made possible through Federal and State Technology (FAST) Partnership Program funding from the U.S. Small Business Administration. For more information, contact Todd at (501) 683-7700 or rctodd@ualr.edu. This story was provided by the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock to research smart health in Arkansas, West Virginia with NSF grant

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 14:38:35 +0000

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is one of five institutions sharing a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a multi-scale integrative approach to digital health. This collaborative, multi-institution grant will be used to promote smart health in Arkansas and West Virginia. Dr. Nitin Agarwal, ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy endowed chair and professor of information science, will receive $600,000 for the study, entitled “Multi-scale Integrative Approach to Digital Health: Collaborative Research and Education in Smart Health in West Virginia and Arkansas,” which runs from August 2019 to July 2023. The other university partners include the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, West Virginia University, and West Virginia State University. “Healthcare costs are on the rise nationally and significantly more so in Arkansas and West Virginia. This is due to high poverty rates in these states and a significantly large population that is affected by cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, and a general lack of physical activity,” Agarwal said. “To address these issues, we will conduct a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and a multi-scale integrative approach to trigger smart health initiatives with the goal to lower healthcare costs using artificial intelligence and big data analysis approaches. In addition to developing a big data and smart health research infrastructure, we will create education and outreach components to enhance the workforce in both states.” To accomplish these goals, Agarwal will develop novel social media mining algorithms to study health behaviors in Arkansas and West Virginia, including health attitudes, intentions, health conditions, lifestyle choices, overall sentiment, and mood. “Tapping into such an invaluable data trove is often challenging but rewarding,” Agarwal said. “We will study the effectiveness of health communities around predominant health issues in Arkansas and West Virginia and study the validity of social media data for examining patient-reported outcomes, assessing trust, influence, and misinformation in social media pertaining to health discourse.” Agarwal heads the at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, which aims to be at the forefront of the ever-evolving field of social computing. COSMOS is leading several collaborative projects with total funding of more than $10 million from various U.S. federal funding agencies to address some of the most challenging problems of knowledge extraction from big social data and develop methodologies to diagnose novel pathologies of online social media.

Emerging Analytics Center hosts teacher workshop to promote cybersecurity education

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 12:31:34 +0000

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock Emerging Analytics Center hosted a three-day workshop for secondary education teachers who teach cybersecurity in Arkansas June 5-7. Funded by a from the National Science Foundation, the workshop is part of a program to promote cybersecurity education in Arkansas high schools. The 20 participating teachers learned about the fundamentals of cybersecurity, including spoofing, network protection, cryptography, cyberattacks, web application security, and password cracking. Additionally, the teachers evaluated an open-source cybersecurity curriculum currently in development by ��Vlog��ý Little Rock professors and graduate students. Members of the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Cybersecurity Club are creating cybersecurity exercises through cloud technology that high school teachers will be able to provide to their students at no cost beginning in the fall. This is part of ��Vlog��ý Little Rock’s effort to create a pipeline for students to fill cybersecurity positions in the workforce. “This workshop meets a significant need since the state of Arkansas is very interested in utilizing cybersecurity in secondary education,” said Philip Huff, a research associate with the Emerging Analytics Center who ran the workshop. “Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s has expanded computer science education, and now they want to expand cybersecurity education. We want to play a central role in educating cybersecurity students and getting them ready for the workforce.”

Philip Huff (right), ��Vlog��ý Little Rock assistant professor and research fellow at the Emerging Analytics Center, leads a cybersecurity workshop for high school teachers from around the state. Photo by Ben Krain.

Workshop participant Scott Maddox just finished up his first year as a cybersecurity instructor at Vilonia High School. He was inspired to make the switch from band director to cybersecurity teacher after Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed Arkansas Act 187, which required all of the state’s public and charter high schools to offer a course in computer coding. “When Gov. Hutchinson came out with the computer science education initiative, I really jumped on it, took a lot of training courses, and learned as much as I could,” Maddox said. “It’s been a very rewarding transition.” Maddox said the most valuable part of the workshop has been gaining access to tools, programs, and activities that he can incorporate into his future classes. “Overall, the fact that we are getting some really good tools to use in the classroom is a great benefit,” Maddox said. “The big thing is the virtual lab environments that enables the students to utilize a lot of the techniques they are learning to defend against cyberattacks without negative consequences on our school’s network. That is very valuable for someone like me who doesn’t have a computer science background.”

��Vlog��ý Little Rock student wins awards for research into treatment of pancreatic cancer using nanomedicine

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 12:58:48 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock doctoral student is receiving accolades for her research studying 3D models for the treatment of pancreatic cancer using nanomedicine. Emilie Darrigues, a doctoral student in applied science-chemistry, studies how plasmonic nanoparticles, some designed to deliver medicine targeting cancer cells, interact with cell cultures in a 3D model through her work as a graduate research assistant in the Center for Integrative Nanotechnology Sciences. Since the center receives funding through the Arkansas EPSCoR program, the center’s researchers participated in the Center for Advanced Surface Engineering (CASE) conference, where Darrigues received the first place award in the graduate student poster competition. In addition to the award, Darrigues received a $1,500 travel grant to attend the national EPSCoR conference in South Carolina in October. The Arkansas National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR program is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, statewide grant program leveraging $24 million over five years to expand research, workforce development, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational outreach in Arkansas. The Center for Advanced Surface Engineering (CASE), is designed to strengthen research in Arkansas with national significance and major economic development. Darrigues received bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and rheology/functional materials in France, followed by four years of industrial work in research and development and lean manufacturing. While pursuing a master’s degree in engineering in France, Darrigues interned at the Center for Integrative Nanotechnology Sciences in summer 2013. She was so impressed with ��Vlog��ý Little Rock that she knew she wanted to pursue a doctoral degree here, which she began in 2015. “You have very skilled people here with a lot of knowledge,” she said. “I have a lot of support that allows me to build a very good research project, but I can also be very independent. I was very happy to discover that with ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. I am very lucky to work at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock and the nanotechnology center, and I was lucky to find a mentor like Dr. Alexandru Biris (director of the Center for Integrative Nanotechnology Sciences). He trains us to be researchers, not just Ph.D. students.” Darrigues also presented her research project, “Interaction of Drug pH-Responsive Gold Nanorods in ‘Big’ 3D Pancreatic Microtumors Using Fluorescence, Photoacoustic and Photothermal Microscopies,” at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock’s Research and Creative Works Expo on April 18. She received first place in the graduate life sciences category. Darrigues plans to graduate in May 2020. Afterward, she plans to find a postdoctoral research position where she can continue her research using nanoparticles to treat cancer. She is inspired to improve treatment for pancreatic cancer since the disease has low survival rates. According to the American Cancer Society, pancreatic cancer is considered largely incurable with a five-year survival rate of just 5 percent. “The goal of 3D models, spheroids, or organoids mimicking the human body or real cancer tumors is really to try to have an additional ex-vivo step before we go to in-vivo; 3D might support ‘precision medicine’ or personalized therapy,” Darrigues said. “Our next job will be focused on the functionalization of the nanoparticle to increase its interaction with the 3D cancer system in order to optimize our therapeutic approach to treat efficiently the pancreatic cancer cells.”

Graduating student awarded prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 08 May 2019 16:18:55 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock senior has been selected as a 2019 recipient of. Scott Wolf, 19, of White Hall, Arkansas, will graduate May 11 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics with minors in history and English. In the fall, Wolf is headed to New Jersey to pursue a Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology from Princeton University. “Earning the NSF fellowship was a huge accomplishment,” Wolf said. “I had a lot of support from my professors to put together an application of that caliber.” The fellowship provides Scott with three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period through a $34,000 annual stipend and $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to the student’s graduate institution. The program recruits high-potential, early-career scientists and engineers and supports their graduate research training in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Launched in 1952 shortly after Congress established the National Science Foundation, the fellowship program represents the nation’s oldest continuous investment in the U.S. STEM workforce. Since he was homeschooled with his three brothers, Wolf began taking dual-enrollment classes at Southeast Arkansas College at age 14 and graduated high school at age 15. At 16, Wolf was attending ��Vlog��ý Little Rock as a recipient of the Chancellor’s Academic Distinction Scholarship. “��Vlog��ý Little Rock is close to home, and a bunch of people in my department have been able to utilize industry ties and take advantage of our connections with technology companies and other businesses in Little Rock,” he said. “I’ve had the opportunity to take advantage of coursework, research, and industry opportunities.” While at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, Wolf’s work and research opportunities have included working as an undergraduate researcher in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and a tutor in the Mathematics Assistance Center. He has completed internships at Inuvo Inc. and Entergy. Wolf has also studied abroad three times. He spent the summer of 2016 studying at the Chinese Language Institute at Xiamen Huaxia University and has taken faculty-led trips to South Korea and China. Wolf discovered a love of bioinformatics while completing research in the Systems Genomics Laboratory at the MidSouth Bioinformatics Center with Dr. Mary Yang, the center’s director. “I really appreciated the opportunity to do research in bioinformatics with Dr. Yang,” he said. “Without her, I wouldn’t have any experience in the area. Learning how to interact in a lab was invaluable when it came to going to Princeton and moving forward with research.” With a new interest in bioinformatics, Wolf sought out summer research opportunities and found the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Last summer, he conducted research at Princeton in quantitative and computational biology, the field he will now pursue as a doctoral student. “I intend to explore how the fundamentals of mathematics, computer science, and statistics intersect with physiology, genomics, and neuroscience to give insight into complex biological systems,” he said. “I am particularly interested in how complex behavioral patterns can be quantified and how they emerge at the individual and group level.” Looking back on his time at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, Wolf is thankful to professors who served as mentors in his academic pursuits as well as those who lifted his spirits in times of distress. “There have been all kinds of people who have helped me at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. You get research mentors who are critically important and community members, who aren’t formal mentors, but are there to talk to you and have some equity in you as a person,” Wolf said. “Someone like Dr. James Levernier from the English Department who goes out of the way to tell you to pursue your passion and take advantage of all the resources you can. When you are beaten down over a piece of research you can’t understand, they are there to sympathize with you. In the math department, there is a sense of community I haven’t seen elsewhere. I know the professors, and I can talk to them. ��Vlog��ý Little Rock has been a good community for me.”

��Vlog��ý Little Rock receives $1 million to study genetics of heat-tolerant rice

Janea Snyder — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 16:30:32 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and several doctoral students are researching heat tolerance in rice in hopes of helping rice farmers improve their yield – and ultimately – reduce hunger. Dr. Mariya Khodakovskaya, a biology professor and interim associate dean in the College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, received a $1 million grant to study the genetic qualities of rice to determine its heat tolerance. She is part of a consortium of researchers from the University of Arkansas Fayetteville, ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, Oklahoma State University, and Louisiana State University. Dr. Andy Pereira, professor of crop, soil and environmental science in the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and the ��Vlog��ý Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, leads the consortium. The four universities collectively received $4.65 million from the National Science Foundation to support their work over a four-year period. The team is studying the genetics of more than 400 rice varieties collected from around the world. The goal of the project is to ensure active, stable rice production to keep up with future population growth and environmental changes. The results will be shared with farmers. “We are working in live science,” Khodakovskaya said. “This is important because it is close to the needs of society and close to industry. We target a lot of practical problems, and the final results will be results that public can assess and use.” The consortium will study rice grown in two different environments: one under heat stress and one under the actual air temperature of the environment. By comparing the two groups of plants, the researchers will be able to identify varieties of rice that produce high-quality grains in spite of rising temperatures. At ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, four doctoral students in applied science are assisting Khodakovskaya – Diamond McGehee, Sudha Shanmugam, Zoya Nadeem Faruqui, and Kamal Pandey. Kamal Pandey also manages the greenhouse located atop ��Vlog��ý Little Rock’s Center for Integrative Nanotechnology Sciences, where the students grow and monitor rice specimens. Their study examines the links between plant metabolism and heat response in rice in order to identify proteins and biomolecules, called metabolites, associated with heat tolerance. The team will use liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to monitor rice metabolism. “Using that and other data, we can go through and find out which compounds are being produced and identify different sensitivities to heat stress,” said Diamond McGehee of Conway. “We hope it will give us insights into mechanisms for heat tolerance in rice.” Shanmugam, who is from India, said the research is important for the long-term applications. “Rice is a staple food for half of the world’s population,” she said. “Millions of farmers are having trouble growing rice because of climate. Each year, 40 percent of the crops are lost due to drought. Because of that, it’s better to create a drought-tolerant rice if it will help the farmers.” Arkansas is the country’s largest producer of rice, which is also the state’s top export. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Dr. Mariya Khodakovskaya (right) and her team of applied science doctoral students are researching the heat tolerance of rice. Students include (from left) Diamond McGehee, Zoya Faruqui, Kamal Pandey and Sudha Shanmugam. Photo by Benjamin Krain

- University News Archive - ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

Largest NSF Grant Awarded to ����Vlog��ý Little Rock Will Support Ongoing Undergraduate STEM Education Efforts

����Vlog��ý Little Rock Postdoctoral Researcher Receives $40K Grant to Create Predictive Modeling of Refugee Numbers

����Vlog��ý Little Rock Receives Nearly $325,000 NSF Grant to Shine Light on Muslim Hate Crimes in Arkansas

����Vlog��ý Little Rock receives NSF grant to host free virtual cybersecurity camp