The University of California Office of the President awarded $15.5 million in grants, uniting teams of cross-disciplinary experts on the cutting edge of medicine, artificial intelligence (AI), agriculture, and climate justice. The Multicampus Research Program Initiative (MRPI) awards grants to teams every two years through a highly competitive process, drawing on the world-class resources and capabilities of UC’s $7 billion research enterprise to link UC researchers together.
“The MRPI program funds discoveries that are made possible only by the convergence of disciplines to improve the lives of Californians and draws world-class student, faculty and staff talent to our university and our state,” said UC Vice President of Research and Innovation Theresa Maldonado.
Since 2009, UC has made 125 MRPI grants, totaling $156.6 million and involving 739 UC faculty members. This year, 14 winners were selected from 153 team applications.
Four Teams to Advance Health and Medical Science
Four of the awarded teams aim to advance health and medical science, studying autism, active matter, sepsis, and maternal health. Among the winners are researchers from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC San Francisco who will study cell samples from patients with autism spectrum disorder to grow self-organizing, 3D clumps of neurological tissue in a lab. Referred to as “brain organoids,” these 3D clumps are an efficient, less invasive way to study various factors that lead to autism spectrum disorder.
At UC San Diego, UC Irvine, and UCLA, a team aims to scale up a proven method for detecting sepsis, an infection so dangerous it kills 16% of people who contract it. UC scientists developed a life-saving algorithm that can help doctors begin treatment earlier and they hope to roll out this algorithm to emergency departments across the state, potentially saving 8,000 lives annually.
Three Teams Will Make Advancements in Agriculture
The grants will help UC researchers make advancements in California’s most valuable industry—agriculture. Experts from UC’s five Agricultural Experiment Stations will collaborate to study barriers and opportunities for California farms to adopt practices and principles of agroecology.
One team from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC Merced, UC Riverside, and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources aims to boost the agriculture industry’s climate resilience, biodiversity, equity, and economic viability, while other researchers from UC Riverside, UC Davis, and UC Santa Barbara will develop and test new ways to decontaminate wastewater by destroying or filtering out toxic “forever” chemicals, thereby easing water scarcity.
Four Teams to Develop Solutions Regarding Climate Change
With many Californians on the front lines of climate change, grant money from the MRPI will be used by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC San Francisco to study how hotter and more frequent heat waves are impacting the state’s six million public school students.
Another awarded team, this one including experts from UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, and UCLA, will analyze existing youth climate engagement programs at each campus to develop common principles to replicate these programs’ impacts in the state and across the globe.
With record numbers of individuals seeking asylum in the U.S., immigration scholars from UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara are collaborating with asylum organizations in the U.S. and Mexico to better understand how federal policies and practices impact migrants—particularly children and their families.
Four Teams to Break Ground in AI and Basic Research
Despite California’s demographics being linguistically diverse, many language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI), like ChatGPT, have been overwhelmingly trained in English—which poses potential problems as AI’s influence strengthens in government, health care, and culture. A six-campus team, led by UC Santa Cruz, will conduct research into whether and how prevailing AI technologies leave state residents behind, with the team aiming to propose new ways to develop large language models that work equally well, regardless of a user’s first language.
A team of researchers from UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and UC Davis aims to speed up one of modern computing’s foundational processes—matrix multiplication—proposing that streamlining matrix multiplication could break through the limitations of machine learning, data mining, physics simulations, and usher in the next generation of computational discovery.
