Two different research projects being conducted by professors at Carnegie Mellon University are set to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation, the foundation announced.
The Charles E. Kaufman Foundation, a supporting organization of the Pittsburgh Foundation, is awarding $1.8 million total to Pennsylvania institutions for “innovative, interdisciplinary scientific research.
”The grant funding is split into two categories — New Investigator grants, designed for scientists “at the beginning of their careers,” and New Initiative grants for investigators with “strong research records,” looking to establish interdisciplinary collaborations.
Andrew Bridges, a principal investigator and assistant professor in the biology department at Carnegie Mellon University, was named as a recipient of a New Investigator grant, totaling up to $150,000 over two years. Bridges’ research project is titled “Exploring the inter-species interactions controlling bacterial biofilm formation,” and it will “determine how bacteria acts in relation to biofilm communities,” which are “multicellular formations that allow bacteria to survive as a group.”
The other Carnegie Mellon University project to earn a grant is a project titled “Atomically precise metal nanoclusters and their assemblies as ‘ideal’ quantum emitters.” This project, by Linda Peteanu and Rongchao Jin, both investigators and professors in the chemistry department, was awarded a New Initiatives grant totaling up to $300,000 over two years. The goal of the project is to develop a new class of materials – “atomically precise metal nanoclusters containing more than one element and having both a precise number of total atoms and atomic composition.”
According to the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation, there are six other projects from Pennsylvania universities outside of the region that will also receive funding.
