Series of plants showing growth, final stage is a lightbulb. Concept image.

Huck Seed Grants

These grants support high-impact, innovative research projects that align with the Huck’s strategic research priorities and have the potential to drive scientific breakthroughs and generate significant return on investment.

Huck seed grants foster innovative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative life sciences research with the potential to drive scientific breakthroughs and generate new research directions leading to impactful externally funded research. This program is made possible by an endowment created by J. Lloyd Huck and Dorothy Foehr Huck.

Huck Seed Grant proposals may include single-investigator or multi-investigator projects. We especially encourage cross-departmental and/or cross-College collaboration. We are also supportive of cross-institutional collaborations as long as the faculty from the partner institution funds their portion of the work. While not required, we strongly encourage collaborations between junior and mid-level/senior faculty.

Proposals with substantial overlap with projects that are already funded through external grants or other Penn State seed grant programs are ineligible for funding through this solicitation.

The 2026 awarded projects and researchers are:

Principal investigator: Molly Bletz, assistant professor of disease ecology
Huck research themes: Health for Life, Engineering Resilient Ecosystems, Translational Science & Public Impact

In the context of an ongoing fungal disease outbreak among captive salamander populations, Bletz’s project that will identify the disease’s underlying causes, develop and validate diagnostic tools, evaluate risk to amphibian species, and test treatment strategies for identified pathogens

Principal investigator: Sonia Cavigelli, associate professor of biobehavioral health; with collaborators Helen Kamens, associate professor of biobehavioral health; Thomas Neuberger, research professor and director of the High-Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core Facility
Huck research themes: Health for Life, Translational Science & Public Impact, Life at All Scales

Researchers will investigate how exposure to common household allergens, like dust mites, during early development affects brain development in children with allergic asthma. Using a preclinical model and diffusion tensor imaging, the team will examine whether allergen-triggered inflammation disrupts white matter in brain regions involved in cognition and mental health, providing insights into the neurological effects of pediatric asthma

Principal investigator: Paul Gauthier, associate professor of controlled environment agriculture; with collaborators Armen Kemanian, professor of production systems and modeling; Ruairidh Sawers, associate professor of plant response to abiotic stress; Patrick Suthers, assistant research professor of chemical engineering; Wenpeng Yin, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science; Wenrui Hao, professor of mathematics and director of the Center for AI and Mathematical Biology
Huck research themes: Future Foods, AI to Action

Using controlled experiments that vary environmental factors like light, water and CO2 availability for maize and wheat, the team will develop an artificial intelligence (AI) framework to better understand how crop plants respond to changing environmental conditions. They will combine physiological measurements, metabolomics and AI to identify the biological processes that help plants adapt to variations in light, temperature and carbon dioxide, with the goal of improving crop resilience and informing future agricultural research.

Principal investigator: Jesse Lasky, professor of biology; with collaborators Charles Anderson, professor of biology; Surinder Chopra, professor of maize genetics
Huck research themes: Future Foods, Engineering Resilient Ecosystems, Translational Science & Public Impact

The Lasky lab recently discovered a strain of sorghum, a cereal grain, that is resistant to Striga hermonthica, a parasitic plant also known as witchweed that devastates cereal crops across sub-Saharan Africa. This project will investigate how sorghum naturally resists Striga. By identifying the genes and biological mechanisms underlying this resistance, the team aims to help develop cereal crops that are more resistant to the parasite while also improving nutritional value and resilience to environmental stress.

Principal investigator: Qunhua Li, professor of statistics; with collaborators Manyu Du, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology; Huijuan Xu, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science
Huck research themes: Health for Life, Translational Science & Public Impact, Life at All Scales, AI to Action

Disruptions in gene regulation underlie many human diseases, but scientists still have limited ability to observe and predict how genes are turned on and off in living cells. This project aims to develop artificial intelligence tools to analyze live-cell microscopy data, enabling researchers to track the dynamic cellular processes that control gene activity in real time, laying the groundwork for future studies of diseases linked to faulty gene regulation, such as sickle cell disease.

Principal investigator: Vatsa Patel, assistant professor of computer science; with collaborators Sairam Rudrabhatla, professor of biology; Anilchandra Attaluri, associate professor of mechanical engineering
Huck research themes: Future Foods, Life at All Scales, AI to Action

Researchers will investigate how changes in the root environment affect the health and nutritional quality of hydroponically grown lettuce before visible signs of stress appear. By combining sensors, imaging and artificial intelligence, the team aims to identify early biological indicators of plant stress and develop tools that help growers optimize crop quality, resource use and yield in controlled-environment agriculture.

Principal investigator: Kumble Sandeep Prabhu, professor of immunology and molecular toxicology; with collaborator Yong Wang, professor of biomedical engineering
Huck research themes: Health for Life, Translational Science & Public Impact

Acute myeloid leukemia is an aggressive blood cancer that often returns after treatment because cancer stem cells evade the immune system. Prabhu and Wang have proposed the development of a cell-based immunotherapy that uses engineered stem cells to continuously deliver a protein that blocks leukemia growth and restores the immune system's ability to attack cancer, with the goal of improving long-term treatment outcomes.

Principal investigator: Emma Jane Rose, associate teaching professor of psychology and director of the Research on Adversity and Risk Lab in the Child Study Center; with collaborators Meg Bruening, professor of nutritional sciences; Ipsita Mohanty, assistant professor of pharmacology; Xiaoxiao Bai, associate research professor and co-director of the Social, Life, and Engineering Sciences Imaging Center
Huck research themes: Future Foods, Health for Life, Life at All Scales, Translational Science & Public Impact

Young adults who consume diets high in ultra-processed foods have higher rates of substance use and are at elevated risk of negative physical and mental health outcomes, but the biological connection between the two remains poorly understood. This project will investigate whether diets high in ultra-processed foods alter communication between the gut and brain — through changes in the gut microbiome, metabolism and brain function — using functional MRI, magnetic resonance spectroscopy and metabolomics to better understand how these biological changes may increase substance use risk and inform future prevention strategies.

Principal investigator: Justin Silverman, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, of statistics, and of medicine; with collaborator Francisco Dini -Andreote, associate professor of phytobiomes
Huck research themes: Future Foods, Health for Life, AI to Action, Life at All Scales

This project will improve the accuracy of microbial community analysis by addressing a key limitation of DNA sequencing data: It measures only the relative abundance of microbes, which can create misleading patterns of association. The researchers aim to develop new statistical methods and a public benchmarking resource to account for uncertainty in microbial biomass, then validate the approach using controlled microbial communities. The resulting framework will help scientists more reliably identify how microbial communities respond to environmental change, advancing research across human, animal and environmental health.

Huck Seed Grants

The 2026 awarded projects and researchers are:

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