WSU invests in rising faculty through seed grant program

Eleven early career faculty members from six colleges across WSU have been awarded the 2025 New Faculty Seed Grant, a competitive program designed to ignite bold research, creative exploration, and scholarly growth at the outset of their academic careers.

Funded by the WSU Office of Research and the Office of the Provost, the New Faculty Seed Grant program has been a cornerstone of institutional support for 25 years. The grants empower junior faculty to build strong foundations for their work, helping them develop projects with the potential to attract major external funding and drive long-term professional development.

"This seed funding is more than financial support-it's a launchpad for innovation," said Kim Christen, vice president for research at WSU. "By investing in our early career faculty, we're helping them turn bold ideas into impactful research and creative work that drives meaningful change, solves real-world problems, and delivers measurable results for Washington and beyond."

This year's awardees represent a wide range of disciplines, with projects spanning scientific innovation to artistic exploration. The selected proposals reflect the breadth and depth of research and creative work underway across the WSU system.

In total, $240,790 was awarded to support 11 projects, reinforcing WSU's ongoing commitment to advancing research excellence and innovation early in faculty careers.

The 2025 New Faculty Seed Grant recipients are:

• Hannah Haemmerli, School of Environment, will study the impacts of dam removal conflicts on long-term water governance in river basins, aiding decision-makers with conflict resolution solutions that can sustainably transform water governance.
• Martin King, School of Music, through his unique position as a French horn player, will expand Asian wind quintet repertoire by commissioning Macao-born, up-and-coming composer Bun Ching Lam and internationally celebrated, Cambodian-born composer Chinary Ung to address the lack of Asian music in western concert halls.
• Bibhushana Poudyal, Department of English, will conduct field research in Nepal, Pakistan, and India, along with remote U.S.-based archival work, to unearth silenced histories, including Dalit movements, Indigenous knowledge systems, feminist activism, colonial cartographic violence, and anti-colonial resistance to integrate marginalized perspectives into academia.
• Peng He, Department of Teaching and Learning, will build a Community of Practice (CoP) to co-design professional learning workshops that equip teachers with strategies to integrate AI literacy into their instruction, ensuring that AI literacy becomes equitable and integral component of K-12 STEM education, preparing students for an AI-driven future.
• Qiawan Chang, School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, will integrate atomic-scale electrocatalyst design with advanced in-situ/operando spectroscopy techniques to understand the role of H202 and ·OH radicals to bridge critical knowledge gaps and discover efficient catalysts.
• Wheaton Schroeder, School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, will explore how problems with lipid metabolism in the brain may link sleep loss and seizures, using computer models to study how brain cells share energy, focusing on a key protein (FABP7) that may connect sleep, metabolism, and epilepsy.
• Emily Qualls-Creekmore, Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience, will study the role stress plays through the activation of basolateral amygdala in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) using a mouse model of IBS to test if basolateral amygdala is responsive to interoceptive signals from the colon via vagal input to the NTS and whether stress amplifies the ability of the basolateral amygdala to exacerbate symptoms in IBS.
• Amy Kemp, Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, will explore the use of mobile technology to improve early detection of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias in rural communities.
• Yefeng Mei, Department of Physics and Astronomy, will develop a next-generation distributed quantum network by combining two powerful quantum technologies: single neutral atoms in optical tweezer arrays and cold atomic ensembles, which will pave the way for a future quantum internet where remote quantum systems collaborate seamlessly to solve problems in complex systems beyond traditional reach.
• Long Nguyen, Department of Management, Information Systems, and Entrepreneurship, will investigate how social media users respond to AI-produced misinformation warnings, the motives they infer, and effective visual designs for these warnings to provide insight into the effectiveness of AI-made fact-check labels and recommend design principals for practitioners.
• Vanessa Delgado, Department of Sociology, will examine the retirement plans of older lower-income Latino/a immigrants (55+) in rural Washington.

Read the full description of these projects on the Office of Research Advancement and Partnerships website.