TDAI is proud to announce its Catalyst Grant recipients for the 2025-2026 year! Four outstanding researchers have been selected based upon their project proposals and have each been awarded $10,000 to carry out their respective projects. 

This year, the areas of research span from agricultural engineering and electrical and computer engineering to pharmacy and public affairs.  

Our first recipient, Darren Drewry, plans to utilize the funding for his project titled “Data-Driven Quantification of Agri-Voltaic Micro-Environments Across Diverse Climatic Regimes”. This project will allow Drewry and his research team to deploy a data monitoring network at two contrasting Agri-Voltaic systems: one in western Ohio and one on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu to evaluate the biophysical changes to the agricultural growth environment induced by AV developments. 

The second grant recipients are Lead PI, Rongjun Qin, and secondary PI, Shuan Song. Their research project is titled “Proof-of-concept: No hallucination of my product: AI-generated image for digital advertising”. This project presents a proof-of-concept that addresses the limitation of AI-generated content (AIGC) and its tendency to “hallucinate” by integrating a physics-based rendering approach. The core idea is to adapt robust scene understanding models capable of decomposing the 3D structure. Material properties, and environmental lighting of a scene from a single image. 

The third recipient is Dr. Xiaolin Cheng for his project entitled “Data-Driven Optimization of Protein Sequence Inputs for Multistate Structural Prediction using AlphaFold”. With the funding received, he plans to research into a new method his team has developed called AF-CLaSeq to clean up noisy data, filtering and refining protein sequences in a way that makes it easier to spot signals related to different shapes a protein might make. This method Cheng and his team plan to use will open new possibilities for studying how proteins change shape, which is important for understanding how they work and for designing better drugs that target these dynamic behaviors.  

Our fourth and final Catalyst Grant recipient for the 2025-26 year is Esra Gules-Guctas for her project proposal titled “Artificial Intelligence for the Public Good: Advancing AI Governance and Public Service Implementation”. Gules-Guctas and her research team plans to utilize the TDAI funding to conduct outreach, focus groups, and listening sessions that will engage OSU researchers with the public and nonprofit representatives over the next year to build the foundation of knowledge and relationships necessary to establish a long term strategic collaboration through the creation of a working group tentatively called: Ohio AI for the Public Good. 

“The Translational Data Analytics Institute is excited to support groundbreaking research at The Ohio State University. Our Catalyst Grant program supports the first sparks of ideas that grow into full research projects and lead to meaningful impact. The recipients exemplify the dedication, innovation, and perseverance that drive research with meaningful impact in the world. Their work holds the power to shape the future, and we are proud to champion their efforts.” said Tanya Berger-Wolf, Director of TDAI. 

TDAI is excited to see where these projects take their researchers, and how their work will shape the future of their industries. We can’t wait to see the impact they will make! 

More information about this year’s recipients, as well as information about TDAI’s Catalyst Grant Program can be found at: https://tdai.osu.edu/research-action/catalyst-grant-recipients.