Grants Academy FY22 Participants
Supporting early career faculty and researchers with grant proposal development, creating networks, and expanding collaboration possibilities across UMS.
Henri Akono– Maine Business School Associate Professor of Accounting; research interests include executive compensation, capital market audits, corporate governance, analyst forecasts and recommendations
Steven Baer– Maine Maritime Academy Assistant Professor of Marine Science; research interests include interactions between phytoplankton diversity and major macronutrient (carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus) cycling, wet lab and autoanalysis techniques for nutrient chemistry, imaging and high-speed sorting flow cytometry
Scott Bloomberg– UMaine School of Law Associate Professor of Law; research interests include privacy law, cannabis law, constitutional law, cybersecurity law
Jennifer Blossom– UMF Assistant Professor Psychology; research interests include evidence-based child & adolescent psychology, youth internalizing concerns-anxiety, depression & suicide prevention, improving service delivery, access & efficiency, service provision at schools and primary care facilities
Matt Chatfield– UMaine Assistant Professor, Evolution & Eco-Health; research interests include understanding the ecology and evolution of the charismatic North American wood turtle, conservation and species, eco-health, impact of emergent diseases and environmental stressors
Amelia Couture Bue– UMaine Assistant Professor, Media Studies; research interests include experimental design, scale development, and psychophysiological measures such as eye-tracking and fMRI, impact of social media on body image and topics related to media and development, strategies for developing campaigns that more effectively empower women to pursue careers in STEM
Tek Dangi-USM Assistant Professor, Recreation & Leisure Studies; research interests include developing frameworks and links that would contribute to sustainable tourism, ecotourism, community-based tourism (with emphasis on justice, ethics and equity), host-guest interactions in tourism/recreation settings, and positive youth development
C. Matt Graham– USM Associate Professor of Business Information Systems; research interests include information systems design and development, structured query language (SQL), computer network design and configuration, business analytics, virtual teams, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the business applications of artificial intelligence
Sampath Gunukula–UMaine Assistant Research Professor or Forest Bioproducts; research interests include biomass and plastic conversion to power, forest residuals, biofuels, sustainable biorenewable chemicals
Michael Haedicke– UMaine Associate Professor, Sociology; research interests include how concerns about sustainability become institutionalized in or excluded from markets and public policy arenas. He has also studied food system labor and health issues, with a particular focus on meatpacking and migrant farm workers
Malinda Haslett– USM Assistant Professor, Music; research interests include early 20th century French repertoire, vocal works by female composers
Julie Herron– UMM Assistant Professor, Inclusive Early Childhood Education; research interests include inclusion of all students in regular education classrooms, especially marginalized students, helping teachers implement the most highly effective evidence based practice in the classroom, to improve academic achievement, and provide opportunities for all students to reach their potential
Kelsi Hobbs– UMaine Assistant Professor, Economics; research interests include applied microeconomics, public economics, urban economics, innovation economics, rental housing evictions, topics that affect low- to moderate-income individuals and families, questions that can influence Federal, state, and/or local policy decisions aimed at improving our communities, particularly those that are marginalized
Rachel Hovel– UMF Assistant Professor, Biology; research interests include aquatic ecology, phenology in lakes and river systems, climate change, acidification, arctic fish migration (high elevation ME lakes)
Amanda Klemmer– UMaine Assistant Professor, Landscape Ecology; research interests include studying food-web interactions across ecosystem boundaries, how changes in resources and predators alters bottom-up and top-down food-web interactions, study systems include, but are not limited to: forest-freshwater connections in inland Maine, rockweed food webs in the rocky-intertidal of Maine, and pond-terrestrial food webs in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado
Asheesh Lanba– USM Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering; research interests include lasers and materials engineering, advanced materials applications, LATscan applications and image analysis, shape memory alloy (SMA) applications, bio-inspired composites, LATscan imaging of plants, insects and mammalian tissue, and LATscan image analysis for feature segmentation/classification
Justin Lapp– UMaine Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering; research interests include Solar Thermal Energy and Thermochemistry, Numerical Heat Transfer Modeling for High Temperature Systems, Thermal Radiation, Material Behavior Under Solar Thermal Cycling, Determination of Optical and Thermal Properties of Materials
Vanessa Levesque- USM Assistant Professor, Environmental Science & Policy; research interests include understanding how people make decisions that intersect with the natural, economic and social worlds in which they live, active community resilience efforts, preparing students for environmental and sustainability policy and planning positions in the region
Yan Yan Li– UMaine Assistant Professor, Food Science and Human Nutrition; research interests include health benefits of bioactive dietary components, anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties and the molecular mechanisms, bioactive isothiocyanate from broccoli/broccoli sprouts for cancer chemoprevention, protective role of different broccoli sprout diets in colon inflammation and inflammation-associated tumorigenesis, bioactives and gut microbiota
Marcus Librizzi– UMM Professor of English and Managing Editor of the Library of Early Maine Literature, an imprint of the University of Maine at Machias Press; research interests include creative writing, literary horror, dark fantasy, historical fiction, folklore and the supernatural, scholarly editing, composition, critical theory
Meredith Madden– USM Assistant Professor, Athletic Training; research interests include concussion education and partnering with the Special Olympics Maine to improve healthcare quality and access for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, preparing and mentoring students for a successful transition to practice, acute care and non-orthopedic evaluation, inter-professional education
Nicholas Micinski– UMaine Assistant Professor, Political Science and International Affairs; research interests include global governance, particularly how states and international organizations respond to refugees, migration, climate change, and peacebuilding
Justin Pratt– Maine Maritime Academy Assistant Professor, Chemistry; research interests include understanding how to improve teaching and learning within the chemical discipline, how faculty members make decisions about their instructional practices, how to best use animations and multimedia to support learning, how chemistry is taught in informal settings, pedagogies best for laboratory learning experiences
Dominique Ross– USM, Assistant Professor of Athletic Training; research interests include best practices for teaching and learning, athletic training strategies
Juyoung Shim– UMA Assistant Professor, Biology; research interests include biochemistry, environmental toxicology, arsenic assays, C. elegans modeling, Planaria assays, aging research
Brandon Stewart– USM Assistant Professor, Psychology; research interests include social cognition, interpersonal and intergroup relationships, attitudes and bias, experimental methods and measuring stereotyping and bias at both the explicit level and the implicit or unconscious level, effects of goals and ideologies on intergroup relationships and intergroup attitudes
Fred Strickland– UMPI Assistant Professor, Cybersecurity & Computer Science; research interests include computer science, cybersecurity, collaboration with rural schools, radio spectrum, battlefield communications, AI
Debbie VanLangen-USM Assistant Professor, Exercise Sciences; research interests include exercise health and well-being
Kathryn Walker– UMA Assistant Professor, Dental Health; research interests include dental health and well-being, hygiene practices, and training future practitioners
LeAnn Whitney-Maine Maritime Academy Assistant Professor, Ocean Studies; research focuses on identifying the metabolic mechanisms employed by phytoplankton to persist in nutrient-poor environments, culturing experiments and molecular analyses with physiological measurements to characterize the cellular response of phytoplankton to nutrient deficient conditions
Tara Whiton– UMPI Assistant Professor, Community Health; research interests include sports physiology, community health and nutrition, maternal and infant nutrition, home gardening/home cooking, teaching kitchen
Tim Whiton– UMPI Part Time Faculty, History; research interests include outdoor recreation and community health, lost ski communities of Maine and New England