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Environmental Frontier Grant Program
Since 2009, DENIN has awarded seed grants for 43 environmental research projects, which in turn have led to $5.4 million in new, external
research awards. Seeking to bolster this relationship between support for early-stage research and future funding, we established the Environmental Frontier Grant Program in 2014.
Environmental Frontier Grants aim to build interdisciplinary research teams that will compete successfully for larger federal, state, foundation, or industry awards. The grants enable the researchers to collect preliminary data, formulate and confirm hypotheses, develop and validate methodologies, or otherwise address gaps in knowledge that constitute a barrier to securing competitive funding.
In the first year of the program, grants were awarded to four teams, who investigated new methods of identifying sulfide-oxidizing bacteria responsible for dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere, how a model soil fungus identifies and responds to antagonistic bacteria, new approaches for reducing watershed nitrogen export, and the use of biochar and zero-valent iron to enhance nitrate removal from stormwater runoff.
Left: Eco-hydrologist Luc Claessens and his research team take water samples in Delaware’s White Clay Creek to measure the export of nitrogen from the surrounding watershed.
Environmental engineers Pei Chiu and Julie Maresca each led a Frontier Grant research team during 2014.
Microbial ecologist Tom Hanson and biophysicist Chandran Sabanayagam examine samples of bacteria obtained from Chesapeake Bay.
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