Six marine-based research projects receive $814K in funding

PROVIDENCE – The state on Thursday named six multi-disciplinary teams as winners of more than $814,000 in collaborative research grant awards focusing on marine sciences.
The 2015 Rhode Island Research Alliance Collaborative Research Grants, coming in at $814,042, will fund projects that could lead to improved strategies for fisheries and aquaculture management, and new tools for monitoring ecological change and tracking of toxic spills, state agencies said in a press release.
Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation and the R.I. Science & Technology Advisory Council made the announcement.
“R&D, innovation and globally traded industries are job creators in the United States,” said Raimondo. “Research is a critical component and Rhode Island is in a unique position to take the research, data and findings from these six teams and turn it into jobs impacting our economy for generations to come.”
These grants are the ninth round of awards aimed at facilitating collaborative research in Rhode Island and supporting STAC’s partnership with the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.
To date, STAC has invested $10.6 million in collaborative research projects that have yielded a return of $43 million back to the state in the form of grants for continued research, new federal programs, infrastructure improvements, commercialization of new products and funding for new companies, the state agencies said.
Stefan Pryor, R.I. secretary of commerce, said the grants will help “foster world class research.”
Grant award winners and their awards are:

  • “Diatom community composition as an indicator of coastal ecosystem change,” $158,722, to be used by a team of scientists from Brown University, University of Rhode Island and the URI graduate school of oceanography;
  • “Canaries in Narragansett Bay? Untangling the ecological response of a key diatom genus to environmental change,” $118,895, to be used by a URI Oceanography scientists and expert from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency;
  • “Marine disturbance disease and climate change in Rhode Island’s coastal waters: merging higher trophic level population dynamics models/datasets with lower trophic level climate forecast models,” $139,952, to be used by scientist from URI, its school of oceanography and Roger Williams University;
  • “A proteomics approach to analyzing phenotypic plasticity versus adaptation in the response of marine invertebrates to climate change,” $131,799, to be used by scientists from URI, Brown and Rhode Island College;
  • “Pushing to new limits for models of R.I. bays and Sounds,” $160,449, to be used by scientists from the URI school of oceanography, RWU and Brown; and
  • “Narragansett Bay apex predators’ response to toxic chemicals and climate change,” $104,225, to be used by scientists at RIC and the EPA.

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