Bernadin, O’Connor, Taneja Receive 2025 SPARC Seed Grants
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The Offices of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Research & Engagement have awarded $577,000 in Strategic Partnerships to Advance Research and Creative activity (SPARC) seed grants to 21 interdisciplinary teams, including three featuring members of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS). Executive Director for the Center of Data Science Tom Bernadin and Associate Professors Brendan O’Connor and Jay Taneja will serve on three of the funded collaborations, positioning their groups and the broader campus for stronger cross-college partnerships and future external awards.
SPARC seed grants are awarded across four tiers to teams of faculty members and librarians, with strong preference for teams that include members from at least two different schools/colleges within the university. The projects proposed by each team are expected to represent a new direction or aspect of interdisciplinary collaboration, align with one of the themes of interdisciplinary excellence, and generate significant and tangible outcomes that “spark” continued momentum in research and creative activity.
The SPARC fund was announced in December 2024 as a single program to streamline and replace the Interdisciplinary Research Grant (IRG) and Large-Scale Integrative Research Awards (LIRA) programs that were offered for the past two academic years. More information about SPARC can be found on the Provost’s Office site.
The Manning CICS-affiliated SPARC teams include:
SPARC 1
To support conceptualization projects up to $10,000 that bring together new teams to pursue research and creative projects and develop new working themes. Strong preference was given to teams with no prior collaborations.
PRISM: Private Research Integration with Semantic Models
Team: Patrick Flaherty (Mathematics & Statistics), Zhengqing Ouyang (Biostatistics & Epidemiology), Denise Hershey (Libraries), Tom Bernadin (CICS), and other key personnel from the College of Natural Sciences.
Leveraging Innovations in Natural Language Processing to Analyze Union Contracts and Academic Labor Markets
Team: Ina Ganguli (Economics) and Brendan O’Connor (CICS)
SPARC 2
To support advanced collaborative projects up to $20,000 that lead to one or more interdisciplinary publications, an exhibition or the development of a proposal to pursue smaller external funding opportunities (including state, corporate, foundation or federal funding).
Development and Analysis of a Novel National Inventory of Parcel-Level Drinking Water Infrastructure
Team: Jay Taneja (CICS), Emily Kumpel (Civil & Environmental Engineering), and Nelson da Luz (Civil & Environmental Engineering)
