UChicago awards $450,000 to Argonne-University collaborators

Six pairs of University and Argonne National Laboratory researchers recently received $450,000, collectively, in Strategic Collaborative Initiative seed grants from the University, following a rigorous competition managed by Argonne and the University. Three of the teams received second-year funding.

The FY 2014 recipients include:

Title: “Inference for pathogen interactions”
University of Chicago investigator: Sarah Cobey, assistant professor of ecology and evolution
Argonne Investigator: Jack Gilbert, environmental microbiologist

Title: “Dynamic self-assembly of active nanocolloids as a pathway to novel architectures at the nanoscale”
University of Chicago investigator: Dimitri Talapin, professor of chemistry
Argonne investigator: Alexey Snezhko, scientist, Materials Science Division

Title: “Bio-inspired Active Liquid Crystalline Materials”
University of Chicago investigator: Juan de Pablo, professor, Institute for Molecular Engineering
Argonne Investigator: Igor Aronson, senior scientist, Materials Science Division

Title: “Improving Electricity Markets to Accommodate a Large-Scale Expansion of Renewable Energy (Year 2)”
University of Chicago investigator: John Birge, the Jerry W. and Carol Lee Levin Professor of Operations Management
Argonne Investigator: Audun Botterud, energy systems engineer, Decision and Information Sciences Division

Title: “Facilitating the Intractable: Novel Protein Structures by Racemic Crystallography (Year 2)”
University of Chicago investigator: Stephen Kent, professor of chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology
Argonne investigator: Andrzej Joachimiak, distinguished fellow, Biosciences Division

Title: “Strong Lensing and Halo Cores - Investigating the Physics of Dark Matter (Year 2)”
University of Chicago investigator: Michael Gladders, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics
Argonne investigator: Salman Habib, senior physicist/computational scientist, High Energy Physics Division, Mathematics and Computer Science Division

The Strategic Collaborative Initiatives Program began in 2005 when the University renewed its contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to manage Argonne. The SCI program includes collaborative research projects, strategic joint appointments and joint institutes. The University extended the program to Fermilab when it became co-manager of the lab in 2006.