The University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation today announced the finalists for the UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative, selecting 14 among 134 proposals.

“We are very excited about the potential of UW2020,” WARF Managing Director Carl Gulbrandsen said in a statement. “We think the university has identified projects that are truly innovative and forward-looking in terms of addressing big research challenges. That was the idea when the program was laid out.”

According to a release, UW2020 will support selected projects with an average award of about $300,000 over two years. Also included in the allocation is the support from the UW-Madison Graduate School to cover a graduate student assistantship.

In addition, WARF is providing $5 million to help fund the projects in the first year.

Projects ranged in disciplines and were reviewed by faculty from across the university.

Research

• Anticipating Abrupt Ecological Change in the 21st Century
• Center for Advanced Manufacturing of Chemicals
• Genomic Approaches to Identify Host Factors and Mechanisms that Modulate Pathogen Infections
• Microtargeting in Election Campaigns and its Implications for Democracy
• Molecular Atlas of Alzheimer’s Disease Stages
• Novel Electrodes for Hydroxyl Radical Production to Enable Low-Cost Water Treatment
• Patient-Specific Ventricular Cardiac Tissue Units for Sudden Cardiac Death Prevention
• Reserve Energy Co-Optimization with Real-Time Data from Satellites
• Systematic Functional Annotation of Orphan Proteins by High-Throughput Mass Spectrometry Profiling
• Wisconsin Study of Family Complexity and Public Policy

Infrastructure

• Full-Range Imaging Spectrometer Enables an Innovative Linkage of Genetic, Plant Trait and Remote Sensing Spectroscopy Data
• Human Exercise Research Core Facility for Campus
• Seeing the Hydroscape: Developing a New Approach for the Study of Inland Waters
• UW Human Stem Cell Gene Editing Service