Non-laboratory Scholarship/ Research Support Program (NSRP)

The Office of Research and Innovation received 6 applications in response to the 2022 call for proposals. Two projects were selected for funding:

Behavioral Health Provider Wellbeing Project: Identifying Needs and Developing Solutions

• Sarah Ascienzo, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• NSRP funds will be used to conduct an explanatory sequential mixed methods study that aims to examine the wellbeing of behavioral health providers in North Carolina; identify individual, interpersonal, and organizational factors affecting wellbeing; determine the needs of providers and agencies with regard to wellbeing; and assess the feasibility and acceptability of intervention approaches. Data collected will be used to create a large dataset, as well as inform the development of a Behavioral Health Provider Wellbeing Toolkit to aid providers, educational training programs, and organizations in their efforts to promote wellbeing and mitigate adverse outcomes.

Exploring the Landscape of Graduate Mental Health and Advising Replationsships in Educatore Preparations Programs

• Alicia Fischer, College of Education
• The purpose of the initial research study is to further understand the relationships between feelings of imposterism in graduate students across a variety of fields, with a core focus in the fields of education and STEM, and quality of mentorship with faculty advisors. The research study is the first phase in understanding how anxiety in graduate students, quality of mentorship, and a focus (or lack thereof) on mental health within programs affects graduate student feelings of competence, quality of work, and time to graduation. The results from Phase I will guide the development of training programs for faculty at NC State to build more meaningful mentoring relationships with students and teach faculty about the implications of mental health on graduate student success.

The Office of Research and Innovation received 11 applications in response to the 2021 call for proposals. Eight projects were selected for funding:

I/B/E/S Guidance Dataset

• Nathan Goldman, Poole College of Management
• I/B/ES Guidance is a feed that offers quantitative (numeric) company expectations from press releases and transcripts of corporate events with First Call and I/B/E/S earnings forecasts. This offering enables investment professionals to access company expectations alongside earnings forecasts in a single feed, and most importantly, direct from the market-leading source.

Using State Legislative Tracking to Expand Access to Clean Energy Policy and Incentive Information

• Autumn Proudlove, College of Engineering

Leveraging Technological Innovations to Support Equity and Access in Teaching and Learning

• Tamecia Jones, College of Education

Digital Palimpsests of Cultural Heritage: Developing a virtual experience through time of the Templo de San Ignacio in Bogotá, Colombia

• Julie Wesp, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• This project is an interdisciplinary collaboration to develop a virtual environment of the 17th century Jesuit church called the Templo de San Ignacio in Bogotá, Colombia that draws on historical, archaeological, and bioanthropological research. Through the use of photogrammetry, structured light scanning, and video game development software, we will capture and recreate the interior of the church as it looks today after the final renovations, but also reconstruct the earlier architectural history and burial locations throughout the church that were recovered during archaeological excavations in 2016 – 2017.

Determinants of International Greenfield Investments

• Mark Walker, Poole College of Management
• The Financial Times’ fDi Markets database is the most comprehensive data on cross-border greenfield investments. These data covers 176 countries from 2003 to present. The data includes 24,266 individual projects that accounts for over $1 trillion in capital expenditure investments, the creation of nearly 3 million jobs by over 14,000 companies. Our aim is to better understand the determinants for these greenfield investment decisions that are economically important.

Accelerating computational genomics research

• Ross Whetten, College of Natural Resources
• We propose to add two graphics processing units (GPUs) to an existing compute node of the High-Performance Computing cluster at NC State, with the goal of accelerating computational analysis of genomic data, particularly in the realm of nanopore sequencing. 

Examining the Social and Emotional Needs of Immigrant and Refugee Youth: A Collaboration among Literacy, Counseling, and Social Work Education

• Crystal Lee, College of Education
• We propose to create the Social and Emotional Needs Database for Immigrant and Refugee Youth (SEND).  SEND will be a national database to study the social and emotional needs of immigrant and refugee youth (n = 400). We will collect quantitative and qualitative survey data from a sample of 200 self-identified first and second-generation immigrants and refugee youth (ages 13-18 years old), and 200 high school professional counselors/ social workers/ teachers who work with immigrant and refugee youth. We will also conduct focus group interviews with self-selected immigrant and refugee youth and professionals who would be interested in illuminating their educational and educator experiences. 

Active aging: Using 3D virtual fitting room stimuli to enhance older adults’ spatial visualization ability

• Chanmi Hwang, Wilson College of Textiles
• The purpose of this research is to develop 3D virtual fitting room stimuli to enhance older adults’ spatial visualization ability, in an effort to enhance older adults’ cognitive decline. NSRP funds will be used to a) purchase a national sample (older adults aged 60 years and older) to examine the effects of using 3D virtual fitting room environment on their spatial visualization ability, b) focus-group interviews to validate the results from the national sample data, and c) propose and develop 3D virtual fitting room stimuli that enhance older adults’ spatial visualization ability and online shopping experience.

The Office of Research and Innovation received 11 applications in response to the 2020 call for proposals. Seven projects were selected for funding:

Promoting Positive Racial Climate to Reduce Achievement Disparities between Black and White Youth

• Amy Halberstadt, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• NSRP funds will be used to gather stakeholder perspectives on the interwoven components sustaining negative racial climates within schools. The data will be used to develop a research model other organizational systems can use to achieve positive racial climates.

Coping with COVID-19: A Perspective of Consumers in the U.S. Marketplace: A quantitative research by using data from a national consumer sample

• Yingjiao Xu, Wilson College of Textiles
• The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought enormous changes to society, with almost everyone being affected to different degrees. With stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and travel restrictions becoming part of our lives, consumers have been experiencing dramatic lifestyle changes, including heavy online and home activities. These changes are not only directly associated with consumer wellbeing, but also have exerted an immediate, as well as lasting, impact on the retail industry, which cycles back to influence consumer behaviors. With a national sample purchased through this requested support, research will be conducted to investigate how consumers cope with the COVID-19 pandemic in the marketplace.

Studies examining consumer demand for food, food marketing strategies, and quantifying the welfare effects of food policies

• Kathryn Boys, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
• This project will provide finding to purchase a site license to two Nielsen datasets that collect: (1) consumer purchase and, (2) retail sales data related food products sold in the U.S. The data available through these datasets will be used to examine a variety of studies examining food industry topics including firm and brand competition, price analysis, consumer demand, and analysis of advertising effectiveness.

A House Divided: Rhetoric in American Political Speechcraft – A Smart-speaker History Application and Interactive Art Installation

• Todd Berreth, College of Design
• NSRP funds will be used to develop a prototype smart-speaker-based history application and interactive art installation. This will lead to a future series in which history topics will be introduced through conversational, narrative-based audio engagements with the subject matter.

Request for access to data in I/B/E/S (Institutional Brokers’ Estimate System)

• Nathan Goldman, Poole College of Management
• Critical audit matters (CAMs) are part of the expanded external audit report providing assurance over financial statements. This study examines whether CAMs benefit investors through firms’ earnings management. It specifically used the I/B/E/S dataset to identify whether and to what extent firms receiving a CAM change their propensity to meet or beat analysts’ forecasts using earnings management techniques.

Cultivating Literacy, Inquiry, and Content Knowledge (CLICK): Online Professional Development to Support Literacy Intervention Programs for Elementary English
Learners

• Jackie Relyea, College of Education
• The purpose of the project is to (a) develop an online professional development program, called Cultivating Literacy, Inquiry, and Content Knowledge (CLICK), to support elementary school teachers’ effective implementation of inquiry-based literacy intervention programs for English learners and (b) establish a data repository that will contain a variety of data sources to help to enhance the quality and efficiency of the professional development program and the effectiveness of the literacy intervention programs.

Exploring College Campus Readiness to Address Traumatic Events Among LGBTQ+ Students

• Kim Stansbury, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• NSRP funds will be used to develop a large national database to study trauma experiences among LGBTQ+ college students, as well as college counselors’ preparedness to work with these students.

The Office of Research and Innovation received 13 applications in response to the 2019 call for proposals.  Seven projects were selected for funding:

Successful aging: Examining senior sport based on physical activity, psychosocial benefits, and injury prevalence

• Jonathan Casper, College of Natural Resources
• Funding will provide the NC State PRTM Health & Well-Being Research Initiative with the equipment and capability to expand their internationally recognized research program by investigating the efficacy of sport for older adults. NSRP funds will help in developing a protocol to measure physical activity, as well as development and validation of psychosocial and injury prevalence measures.

Military health and well-being project

• Sarah Desmarais, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• This project will explore the health and well-being of military service members and veterans in the United States. The overall goal of this project is to create a large, nationally representative database that will afford the opportunity to: a) establish a baseline understanding of health and well-being; b) identify potential mechanisms and targets for promoting help-seeking behaviors; and c) define future research priorities.

Trauma informed practice support in schools and communities: Collaboration between education and social work

• Qiana Cryer-Coupet, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• The Trauma Informed Practice Support (TIPS) project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty in the Department of Social Work and the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences. Recent scholarship in both disciplines suggest, new graduates do not feel prepared to engage and address issues related to family trauma. Additionally, little is known about personal experiences of family trauma and how they affect social workers and teachers’ ability to support families. This funding will allow the team to create a national database (n = 800) to study the family-level trauma experiences of teachers and social workers. It will also allow us to examine their professional preparation and perceived needs for trauma-informed professional support.

Purchasing U.S. equity data to help develop modern financial econometrics and statistics methods

• Denis Pelletier, Poole College of Management
• Recent developments in financial econometrics and statistical analysis are based on ultra-high frequency observations where all transactions of assets are employed. Increases in algorithmic trading has altered the behavior of financial markets. To facilitate this type of research, this grant will allow the project team to update a database of U.S. equity transaction data.

Archive of agricultural gentic engineering society

• Matthew Booker, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• NC State’s Genetic Engineering and Society Center is creating an oral history archive of the technological development and societal context of the early years of agricultural biotechnology. The Archive of Agricultural Genetic Engineering and Society (AAGES) will interview genetic engineers, stakeholders, and scholars from the founding generation of agricultural biotechnology to develop an online video and transcript archive at the NC State libraries for education, engagement, and research.

Visualizing community college data for research-driven practice

• Melissa Whatley, College of Education
• The Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research produces research needed to help solve critical problems of practice facing community colleges today, with a specific focus on community colleges in North Carolina. Data analysis and visualization related to key areas surrounding community college student success including economic mobility, regional economic and educational capacities, and institutional climate will be explored.

Discovering key factors affecting agricultural production risk through big-data nonparametric statistics

• Zheng Li, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
• The research support requested is for access to the USDA’s Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data. ARMS is USDA’s primary source of information on the financial condition, production practices, and resource use of America’s farm businesses, as well as the economic well-being of America’s farm households. Each year, ARMS targets several selected crops. With access to ARMS data, researchers at NC State will be able to develop a better understanding of factors that affect various production risks.

The Office of Research and Innovation received 12 applications in response to the 2018 call for proposals. Eight projects were selected for funding:

An Eye on the Street: Enhancing Urban Analysis, Historical Inquiry and Narrative Storytelling through Street-level Photography, Computer Vision and Machine Learning

• Todd Berreth, College of Design; Co-PIs: Frederico Freitas, College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Arnav Jhala, Tianfu Wu, College of Engineering
• This funding will be used to purchase a high-quality 360 VR 3D camera, car-mounting rig and GPU machine-learning workstation. The equipment will help advance numerous multidisciplinary Visual Narrative Cluster research projects, related to the use of panoptic street-level photography, machine-learning and computer vision, for urban historical analysis, and urban planning, architectural design and historic preservation practice. The camera will also be used to support project-based courses, in the humanities and design communities, related to VR video storytelling.

Visualizing Cultural Landmarks: An Interactive 3D Map of China’s West Lake

• Xiaolin Duan, College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Co-PI: Noboru Matsuda, College of Engineering
• This funding will purchase augmented reality glasses to create an interactive 3D map of West Lake (in Hangzhou, China), which will reconstruct the historical space and cultural sites near, on, and below the lake with virtual reality. West Lake has been one of the most important cultural landmarks since the eleventh century, and to date, still remains one of the most visited scenic sites in the country. We propose that such an interactive 3D map, using tangible computing and augmented reality technologies, will facilitate the elaboration on the interplay between the human activities and the natural worlds, and the ways that this cultural landmark became a subjective and socially constructed site.

Uncovering complex ecosystems on university campuses with new educational Methods

• Terry Gates, College of Sciences; Co-PIs: Jane Lubisher, Jason Painter, College of Sciences; Heather Vance-Chalcraft, East Carolina University
• This project will develop new teaching tools to put NC State students in charge of uncovering the complex ecosystems that reside inside our university campus. Data collected from the microscopic realm to giant trees will provide students the chance to learn science the way that it truly conducted while viewing their campus in brand new ways, ecologists the chance to understand how human-made ecosystems differ from those in unaltered areas, and designers and landscape architects the chance to see the impact of stylizing plant communities on their constituent ecosystems.

Knowledge, decisions, and impact: An interdisciplinary social epigenetic study of toxins among low- to moderate-income families

• Jodi Hall, College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Co-PIs: Cathrine Hoyo, College of Sciences; Mary Haskett, Amy Halberstadt, College of Humanities & Social Sciences
• This interdisciplinary effort explores the devastating impact of toxins and pollutants on development, health, and parenting among low to moderate income families. The researchers will enroll participants currently involved in an ongoing NC State study of Social Epigenomics and Minority Health Disparities. The goal of the study is to understand how families make decisions related to toxins, what kind of information is available for these decisions, and how these decisions impact their overall well-being. The data collected will support programs that seek to decrease health disparities as well as those that seek to reduce exposure to toxins.

Exchange Rate Predictability

• Ayse Kabukcuoglu-Dur, Poole College of Management
• This funding will purchase a Consensus Economics dataset of exchange rate and G7 forecasts. These data will be used to explore the research questions: Does global credit growth help forecast exchange rates? and Do professional forecasts or economic models with credit predict exchange rates better? and can be used to explore other questions in these areas.

Vowel quality repository

• Jeff Mielke, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• This project will assemble a database of vowels, consisting of audio recordings and articulatory data including ultrasound video of tongue movements. The database will include existing recordings from Kalasha, an endangered language spoken in Pakistan, and the project involves new data collection from Bora, an endangered language spoken in Peru.

Accelerating Computational Science and Engineering Research through GPUs

• Melissa Pasquinelli, College of Textiles; Co-PIs: Andrew Petersen, Office of Information Technology; Casey Dietrich, College of Engineering; Denis Fourches, College of Sciences; Josh Gray, College of Natural Resources; Ranga Raju Vatsavai, Yaroslava Yingling, College of Engineering; Mengment Zhu, College of Textiles
• Traditionally, modeling and simulations use central processing units (CPUs) for high performance computing, which means that multiple CPU cores are used in parallel, often from multiple computers. However, for many modeling and simulation applications, speed-ups have been realized by factors of 6 or more through use of graphical processing units (GPUs). This means that not only can these calculations be done faster, but also that the increased speed/performance enables larger systems to be modeled and simulated with GPU acceleration in less time than with CPU-only resources, and can also lead to improved statistical power of the results. Thus, this resource will empower over 30 research groups (representing most of the colleges at NC State) to remain competitive in their disciplines.

Helping FACES: Developing an Autism Resource Repository for Families and Professionals

• Jamie Pearson, College of Education; Co PI: Natalie Murr, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Helping FACES is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences and the Department of Psychology’s Psychoeducational Clinic to meet the needs of historically underrepresented families of children with autism across the state of North Carolina. As an extension of our existing FACES program, Helping FACES will include: (a) psychological assessments for children who are at risk for autism, (b) the development of an online autism resource repository to help families navigate access to services, and (c) ongoing Meeting FACES Workshops to spread autism awareness in underserved communities and conduct family needs assessments

The Office of Research and Innovation received 26 applications in response to the 2017 call for proposals. Nine proposals were selected for funding:

Customized Service with SciStarter.com to Pioneer a Citizen Science Campus

• Caren Cooper, College of Natural Resources

Test Drive of the Crimson Hexagon Social Media Analytics Platform

• Jean Goodwin, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Co-PIs: Christopher Healey, College of Engineering; Nicole Lee, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

The Black Families Project: Dyadic Adolescent-Caregiver Well-being Survey

• Elan Hope, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Co-PI: Qiana R. Cryer-Coupet, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Leveraging Geospatial Climate Data to Solve Environmental and Agricultural Problems in North Carolina

• Anders Huseth, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
• Co-PI: Natalie Nelson, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Seeking Harmony: An Exploration of the Role of Gender in the School-Work-Life Experiences of Graduate Students across Academic Fields

• Audrey Jaeger, College of Education
• Co-PI: Katalin Szelényi, UMASS Boston

Analysis of Pottery from Petra in Jordan

• S. Thomas Parker, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

FACES at State: Fostering Advocacy, Communication, Empowerment, and Supports for African American Families of Children with Autism

• Jamie Pearson, College of Education
• Co-PI: Natalie Murr, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Examination of the Retail Subscription Services Model: An Impact, Motivation, and Consumer Profile Assessment

• Lori Rothenburg, College of Textiles
• Co-PIs: Delisia Matthews, College of Textiles; Qiana R. Cryer-Coupet, College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Stefanie Robinson, Poole College of Management

Bringing the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) to NC State

• Timothy Stinson, College of Humanities and Social Sciences