I-Corps Translational Strategies for Experiential Supercomputing
PI: Win Burleson (The University of Arizona)
Co-PIs: Gustavo De Oliveira Almeida, Steven Wood (The University of Arizona)
Funding: National Science Foundation, $50,000
Project Dates: September 1, 2025 – August 31, 2026
Summary:
This I-Corps project will advance translational strategies for the NSF MRI Holodeck in the areas of health and education. The Holodeck is a first-of-its-kind experiential supercomputing environment. It is a well-integrated, immersive, collaborative, virtual/physical extended reality environment providing unparalleled tools for research collaborations, intellectual exploration, education, and creative output. It incorporates visual, audio, and physical components; novel AI technologies to enhance human-human, human-agent, and human-robot social interactions; rapid prototyping and fabrication tools; and tightly coupled interactive visual, audio, and physical experiences. The Holodeck provides a flexible, modular, reconfigurable infrastructure with a comprehensive capacity to capture and analyze behavioral, physiological, affective, cognitive, contextual and environmental data. It is capable of providing real-time immersive data visualization and haptic experience coupled with sophisticated co-located and distributed digital twinning capabilities.
Awards: 2025 NSF Spirit of I-Corps Award
VCR: Virtual Cognitive Rehabilitation Using a Virtual Reality Spatial Navigation Application for Veterans with a History of Traumatic Brain Injury
PI: Jonathan Lifshitz (University of Michigan)
Co-PIs: Lila Boz, Ren Boz (The University of Arizona) and Matthew Law (University of Michigan)
Funding: Arizona Veterans Research and Education Foundation, $499,669
Project Dates: August 31, 2024 – August 31, 2027
Publications:
“Insights from the Participatory Design of a Virtual Reality Spatial Navigation Application for Veterans with a History of TBI,” IEEE Xplore, 2024
Summary:
This research aims to deliver cognitive rehabilitation for individuals with a history of traumatic brain injury through a virtual reality serious game featuring five novel virtual environments populated with randomly generated spots. The researchers hypothesize that exposure to novel environments may activate neural populations important to spatial learning, thereby potentially facilitating cognitive rehabilitation. Users explore these environments and complete destination-finding tasks across multiple levels with gradually increasing difficulty.
Biotic and Abiotic Drivers of the Prevalence of the Gulf Coast Tick and an Associated Vector Borne Disease in Arizona
PI: Sabrina McNew (The University of Arizona)
Co-PIs: Cristian Román-Palacios, Paulina Maldonado-Ruiz (The University of Arizona)
Key Personnel: Henrey Deese (The University of Arizona)
Funding: U.S. Geological Survey, $438,945
Project Dates: August 15, 2024 – August 14, 2028
Website: www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/67a3f19bd34e63325c2b748a
Summary:
This project aims to study the Gulf Coast tick’s presence in Arizona in partnership with the Tucson Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy. Over the course of three years, the research team will capture birds and inspect them for ticks and take key health measurements. Researchers will then use these measurements to determine how the tick and its associated bacteria affect bird health. This will allow researchers to combine these data with a rigorous census of the tick across southeast Arizona to create maps of where this tick is found and identify the most important habitat features that affect its distribution and abundance. The results of this project will help determine whether changing climate, habitat loss, or dispersal by birds is the most likely cause behind the emergence of Gulf Coast ticks in Arizona.
Collaborative Research: USA National Phenology Network 2.0: Reimagining How We Experience the Signs of the Seasons
PI: Theresa Crimmins (The University of Arizona)
Co-PIs: Rob Guralnick (Florida Museum of Natural History)
Key Personnel: Ann Shivers-McNair, Alison Meadows (The University of Arizona)
Funding: National Science Foundation / Infrastructure for Biological Research Program, $1,217,623
Project Dates: 2024-2028
Website: usanpn.org/nn/NewApp
Publications:
“Attending to Relations of Participation in an Information-as-Potentiality Approach,” Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting 2025 Symposium, 2025
“Collaborative Redesign of Nature’s Notebook,” Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting, 2026 (poster)
Summary:
The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) is a national initiative that focuses on collecting and organizing phenological data to help support long-term tracking of seasonal events in plants and animals and better understand changes over time. In this project, the USA-NPN is undertaking a major overhaul of its mobile application, Nature’s Notebook, through a multi-step process led by the Mobile App Working Group (MAWG), a co-design collective composed of science graduate students and faculty, scientists working outside of academia, medical doctors and other community partners. The intended outcome of this effort is a larger pool of observations contributed from a greater diversity of locations and by a more diverse group of observers that will, in turn, yield a more robust dataset better suited for use in scientific discovery and documenting global change.
