Seed Grant Awardees
Hear from past awardees about their experience with IDS Interdisciplinary Research Grants.
STEM research often begins with big questions—both scientific and personal: Can I solve an important problem I care about? Will my work matter? Who do I need on my team?
The Institute of Diversity Sciences (IDS) helps faculty and students answer those questions in a community that emphasizes the empowerment of socially meaningful science, engineering, and technology.
Through its Interdisciplinary Research Grants, IDS funds early-stage research teams tackling real-world problems using theories and tools from the sciences, engineering, and computer science. The projects vary in focus and field, but they share the same goal: to investigate and tackle complex socially relevant problems using interdisciplinary scholarly approaches by bringing together teams of faculty and students across disciplines. By doing so, a problem-focused interdisciplinary research-to-impact community is created that trains and mentors students, builds their confidence and prepares them to pursue work grounded in social impact.
Below, faculty and student recipients of IDS funding reflect on their research experience in their own words.
Science with Purpose
Dr. Christian Guzman, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been integrating data on social vulnerability and flood risk across Massachusetts with support from an IDS grant. The goal of this project is to help ensure that flood mitigation efforts prioritize communities most at risk.
For Guzman, research can be daunting—but it’s also an opportunity to serve a higher purpose.
“You can have hypotheses, you can have well-designed experiments, and many things fail,” he says. “[But that’s] not a reflection on you… Success will come along the way, but… what you should draw meaning from is what really matters to you.”
Guzman brings that philosophy to his work with students as well—like former Ph.D. student Cielo Sharkus. Motivated by her own passion for environmental justice, Sharkus found her way to Guzman’s team.
“Dr. Guzman laid out all the information I needed to understand what it would mean to get my Ph.D. and the type of work I would do afterwards,” she says. “That’s where I got really excited… doing something that really helps the community and helps people.”
Dr. Shannon Roberts, associate professor of industrial engineering, echoes the emphasis on real-world impact. Co-leading two interdisciplinary studies exploring transportation-related challenges for Black women and young drivers with ADHD, Roberts treats research skills as giving people an ethical responsibility.
“Do something with all this power that you have as an engineer to make the world a better place,” she says. “Make something that will make someone’s life easier, better, safer.”
Learning to Thrive
For some students, the most pressing challenges are personal: a feeling that they might not belong or be able to succeed. For these students, one of the most beneficial aspects of IDS funding is the experience of mentorship by faculty who have been through it themselves.
“I feel self-doubt very often,” says Bel Corder, one of IDS’s undergraduate student researchers who graduated from UMass this year. Corder’s seed grant project examines how communities of color interpret demographic shifts in the population of the United States.
“There are always times, especially… doing research that I had never done before, where I [felt] a little overwhelmed. But I think you really just have to dive head first into what you’re doing—and trust your mentors to tell you what to do.”
Those mentors, in turn, find meaning in helping the next generation thrive.
These days, Dr. Ivon Arroyo, associate professor in the College of Education and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, is developing bilingual digital math tutoring software that helps Spanish-speaking children study in their native language and with avatars that look like them.
The principle behind Arroyo’s work—that students should never have to question whether they “fit in” in a learning environment—reflects lessons learned from a challenging period early in her career.
“I remember finding some of my classes really hard, particularly in graduate school, and being afraid maybe that computer science wasn’t for me,” she says. “It’s very important to ask for help, to go to office hours, to talk to your professors, to say what is working, what’s not working.”
Roberts offers similar advice: “A lot of the tips that I give students have to do with perseverance,” she says. “The worst they can do is say no—which means apply. Go out there, be bold, take the initiative.”
That shared spirit—of self-advocacy and perseverance in pursuit of personally- and socially-transformative research—defines the community IDS has built through its seed grants. In bringing together students from all backgrounds with faculty who know the path’s challenges, IDS has created a space where emerging researchers learn how to make an impact through science and find strength, meaning, and belonging in the process.