06/08/2026
By Anne Maglia

The Office of Research Development is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 UMass Lowell Internal Seed Grants.

The goal of this program is to support faculty in:
• developing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborative efforts leading to sustainable research and scholarship and
• generating preliminary results, innovative ideas, and high-quality scholarship or creative works that grow UMass Lowell’s research portfolio and capacity.

If you have any questions about specific projects or ideas for collaboration, please contact the PI directly or email RD@uml.edu.

Congratulations to the awardees:

• PI: Stephanie Block, Associate Professor, Psychology, College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
o Co-PI: Joseph Gonzales, Associate Professor, Chair, Psychology, College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
o Co-PI: Hannah Johnson, Assistant Teaching Professor, Psychology, College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
o Co-PI: Alice Newton, Medical Director, Child Protection Program, Mass General Hospital
o Project Title: Accommodations & Resources for Child Victims of Sexual Abuse: A Stakeholder Survey
o Award Amount: $15,000

• PI: Zeinab Hajjarian, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Francis College of Engineering
o Co-PI: Chiara Ghezzi, Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Francis College of Engineering
o Project Title: Optical quantification of cervical viscoelastic signatures as an early mechano-biomarker of preterm birth
o Award Amount: $15,000

• PI: Yuho Kim, Assistant Professor, Physical Therapy and Kinesiology, Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences
o Co-PI: Soumita Das, Professor, Biomedical & Nutritional Sciences, Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences
o Project Title: Development of Patient-Derived Muscle Organoids to Model Skeletal Muscle Pathophysiology in Friedreich’s Ataxia
o Award Amount: $15,000

• PI: Mei-Yun Lin, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Francis College of Engineering
o Co-PI: Ofer Cohen, Associate Professor, Physics and Applied Physics, Kennedy College of Sciences
o Project Title: Characterizing the Space Weather Impact by Tracing Heavy Ions in the Terrestrial Environment
o Award Amount: $6,500

• PI: Kimberly Merriman, Professor, Management, Manning School of Business
o Co-PI: Michael Obal, Associate Professor, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, Manning School of Business
o Co-PI: Teresa Gonzales, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Loyola University Chicago
o Project Title: Soft Infrastructure and Informal Governance in Adaptive Reuse Organizational Systems: Emergence of Order Without Hierarchy
o Award Amount: $14,986

• PI: Samantha Reig, Assistant Professor, Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences, Kennedy College of Sciences
o Co-PI: Jose Mauricio Galli Geleilate, Associate Professor, Management, Manning School of Business
o Project Title: Examining the Effects of Bounded vs. Freeform AI Writing Support on Students' and Workers' Self-Perceptions and Perceptions of Peers
o Award Amount: $15,000