Provost’s Research Awards honor faculty’s innovative projects

By Barbara Gutierrez [email protected] 04-27-2026

How can losing a spouse affect your heart?

How did Bette Davis take on the Hollywood studio system and inspire other actresses to do the same? Can Artificial Intelligence help students learn about data?

These are some of the topics being studied by faculty members who have received the Provost's Research Awards. The awards are granted yearly to University of Miami faculty members who are engaged in notable research. Forty-three faculty members received the annual grant this year, which comes with $13,500 to apply toward their research.

This year, the research awards ranged on topics which include studying how to unlock the origins of the first black holes to studying Florida's insurance crisis on household financial behavior.

"These awards recognize faculty who advance research and scholarship through dedication, creativity, and excellence. The Provost's Research Awards celebrate their impact on both the University and the broader academic community," said Alberto J. Caban-Martinez, interim vice provost for research and scholarship.

Three faculty members share information about their individual project.

Diana A. Chirinos, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been studying how bereavement affects a person's cardiovascular health and in particular how it disturbs sleep.

"After losing a spouse the risk for having morbidity and dying from a cardiovascular event is very high," said Chirinos.

The grant will allow her to set up a study with 40 participants that would check their daily activities as well as their sleep. Participants would answer questions on their emotions and would be supplied with physical activity trackers to track their daily activities and nighttime sleep. They would also answer questions about the quality of their sleep.

In addition, the participants would wear monitoring patches that would detect changes in their heart rate over the course of a regular week.

The study, called "The Cardiac Outcomes and Psychophysiological Effects in Bereavement," will help to detect sleep problems such as insomnia as well as track the frequency of "grief waves," moments in which participants are actively thinking about the loss. These factors are likely to affect them physically and emotionally but are rarely captured in real-time.

Chirinos hopes the results will help her develop appropriate interventions to help the patients during this difficult period in their lives and reduce their cardiovascular risk.

Christina Lane, professor of film studies in the Department of Cinematic Arts and dean of graduate studies at the School of Communication, has been working on a book to be called "The Women vs Warner Bros.," detailing how Hollywood actresses fought against the rigid-often misogynistic-ways that Warner Bros. Studio would control them through strict contracts that often limited their careers.

The actress Bette Davis was one of the first to sue Warner Bros. Studio in the 1930s to stop the studio's practice of offering actresses strict contracts that dictated roles for actors and actresses.

She lost that legal suit, but when the move is seen as part of a larger wave, what stands out is the way she mobilized other actresses to initiate their own battles.

Later, the actress Olivia de Havilland launched her own suit against the studio and won. This forced the studios to give actors and actresses more freedom to guide their own careers.

The Provost's Research Award will allow Lane to finish the last four chapters of her book, as well as travel to Austin, Texas, to visit the University of Texas at Austin where a new collection of Olivia de Havilland materials will soon be released, she said.

Jennifer Kahn is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the School of Education and Human Development. Her research examines interdisciplinary, technology-rich activities to support youth and community learning.

In the past few years, fueled by a National Science Foundation grant, she and colleagues developed a virtual game called "Isles of IIkmaar" where middle schoolers engaged in a multiplayer world, created avatars, and were able interact with mythical creatures to solve environmental mysteries. The game was co-designed with young people to align with their interests.

Along their virtual journey, students explored their own game play data in tables and graphs as they interacted with creatures to help them regain their health, create new relationships, or fashion new experiences for them.

Instead of treating data as abstract numbers, when embedded in stories, relationships, and choices, the learning experience is more meaningful and accessible, especially for young learners, Kahn said.

Kahn realized that a good way to reach young people and teach them about data and the emerging field of generative artificial intelligence could be to create similar gaming experiences.

"They were learning to use data to inform decision making and that requires analyses and interpretation," she said.

The Provost's Research Award will allow Kahn to set up a lab where up to 30 middle school students can engage in creating games, using data and prompts to build interactive simulations with generative AI characters.

View a complete list of the Provost's Research Award recipients.