The University of Iowa College of Dentistry is pleased to announce the 2023 Seed Grant Awards.
This is the third year of the seed grant program, and these grants fund innovative projects from early-career investigators or established investigators who are developing a new line of research. The goal of these grants is to encourage research and generate data that will enable the awardees to be competitive for peer-reviewed national funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health.
“I am very proud that the college was able to support five outstanding applications,” said Associate Dean for Research Jin Xie, “and these seed funds will continue ensuring that our research proposals are highly competitive for external funding!”
Each 2023 Seed Grant proposal was reviewed and evaluated by the College of Dentistry Research Proposal Advisory Panel (RPAP), and award amounts for the proposals were based on the panel’s review and scoring of the proposals, the requested budget, and the available funds.
Based on these criteria, the 2023 Seed Grant Awards are:
Huojun Cao
Associate Professor of Endodontics
Project Title: "Molecular characterization of tooth root development"
Susan McKernan
Associate Professor of Preventive and Community Dentistry
Project Title: "Pandemic dental office closures: a natural experiment to identify nondeferrable dental conditions"
Heidi Steinkamp
Assistant Professor of Pediatric Dentistry
Project Title: "Impact of Stress on the Oral Microbiome of Children"
Juhi Uttamani
Assistant Professor of Periodontics
Project Title: "Salivary miRNA Signatures of Adult Metabolic Syndrome"
Co-Principal Investigator: Sukirth Ganesan
Shaoping Zhang
Assistant Professor of Periodontics
Project Title: "Using patient’s clinical and biological profiles to improve the precision of periodontal phenotyping"