Lacy-Fischer Interdisciplinary Research Grants support innovative graduate student projects

In 2024, eleven teams of graduate students received Lacy-Fischer Interdisciplinary Research Grants to support projects ranging from advanced optical technologies and gravitational wave detection to medical innovations and autonomous vehicle safety.

The Lacy-Fischer grant supports students through and beyond their academic careers at Vanderbilt. These grants create unique research and professional development opportunities that broaden students' perspectives and enhance their work. These opportunities allow researchers to immerse themselves in the communities and scientific questions that their research seeks to serve.

2024 Lacy-Fischer Research Grant Recipients:

• "Up-conversion and Down-conversion of light by employing Colloidal Plasmonic Nanoparticle Films" Bharat Bharat (PI), Engineering; and Yueming Yan, Physics
• "Towards a Foundational AI model for Gravitational Wave Data Analysis"
  Suyash Deshmukh (PI), Astrophysics; Jesse Spencer-Smith, Ph.D., Computer Science; Karan Jani, Ph.D., Astronomy; and Chayan Chatterjee, Ph.D., Astrophysics
• "Thymic abnormalities and risk of immune checkpoint inhibitor-associated myocarditis" Reilly Fankhauser (PI), Cancer Biology; and Zachary Ewell, Molecular Pathology & Immunology
• "Protect Your Drive: Implementing Early Warnings of Freeway Slowdowns"
  Junyi Ji (PI), Civil Engineering; Austin Coursey, Computer Science; and Alex Richardson, Computer Science
• "Culturally-Sustaining Pedagogies amidst Food Insecurity: Nutritional Knowledge(s), CSA Boxes, and Cross-Cultural Engagement" Amanda Muise (PI), Anthropology; and Rebeca Gamez-Djovic, Ph.D., Anthropology
• "Institutional Divergence in AI Research: A Topic Modeling Approach"
  Cameron Pattison (PI), Philosophy; and Hayoung Seo, Sociology
• "Estimating the Prevalence of Sex Trafficking through Machine Learning"
  Sarah Sowell (PI), Community Research & Action; Rishabh Shah, Data Science; and Audrey Harris, Community Research & Action
• "Improving the Situational Awareness of Sonographers During Telerobotic Ultrasound" Madison Veliky (PI), Mechanical Engineering; Olivia Richards, Mechanical Engineering; and Sarah Li, School of Medicine
• "BEV-Based Autonomous Vehicle Trajectory Planning with Safety Logic and Large Language Model Interpretability" Xia Wang (PI), Computer Science; Ziyan An, Computer Science; and Yuhang Zhang, Civil Engineering
• "A Tale of Two Proteases: Probing Thrombin and Trypsin Binding Interactions to PAR4" Emma Webb (PI), Pharmacology; and Chris Jurich, Chemistry
• "A Molecular Perspective on a Network Disorder: Leveraging Single-Cell Transcriptomics to Improve Outcomes in Epilepsy Surgery"
  Soren Emerson (PI), Neuroscience; Bruno Hidalgo Monroy Lerma, Medical Scientist Training Program/Biomedical Engineering; Anas Reda, Biomedical Engineering; and Ghassan Sebastian Peter Makhoul, Biomedical Engineering

For more information on application requirements, including submission materials and application deadlines, visit the Graduate School website.