Currently Accolades: Grants for September 21, 2020

Every week during the academic year, Currently celebrates faculty and staff accomplishments, including appearances on panels, presentations, recent publications or performances, and research grants.

1. Karen Cellarius, research faculty at the Regional Research Institute for Human Services, is the principle investigator for the evaluation of two Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grants recently awarded to the Oregon Health Authority: OHA's  Oregon Health Authority’s COVID-19 Emergency Response for Suicide Prevention is funded through Oct. 31, 2021, with a total PSU evaluation subaward of  $100,000; and OHA's five-year Zero Suicide Initiative is funded through September 2025 with a total PSU evaluation subaward of $680,000.
2. Kelly Clifton, civil and environmental engineering faculty, will act as principal investigator on a project titled “Accessing Opportunities for Household Provisioning Post-COVID-19,” which was awarded $140,000 from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities. The project will use a mixed-methods study to collect critical information to evaluate the extent to which people modify their shopping behavior, either by choice or necessity, to meet their provisioning needs during the COVID-19 crisis and the following recovery. The project runs through December 31, 2021. Clifton will work with co-investigators Kristina Currans, University of Arizona, and Amanda Howell, University of Oregon.
3. Gerasimos Fergadiotis, speech and hearing sciences faculty, was awarded a $3.4 million, five-year research grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will involve Portland State University; VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and VA Minneapolis Healthcare System in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Fergadiotis, along with William Hula at VA Pittsburgh, will use the grant to create a computerized assessment tool for evaluating anomia, a neurological condition where individuals experience difficulty producing words after a stroke. Fergadiotis and Hula will be joined by Portland State University’s Dan Taylor-Rodriguez, mathematics faculty, who will contribute to the statistical analyses for the project.
4. Kevin Kecskes, public administration faculty, and Christopher Carey, criminology and criminal justice faculty, received a grant for the ninth year in a row from the U.S. Department of State for the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Student Leader Program. Over the course of this USDOS grant, amounts have ranged from $360,000 per year to the 2020-21 amount of $136,200, which was reduced due to remote format.
5. Sirisha Kothuri, civil and environmental engineering research associate, will serve as co-investigator on a project titled “Pedestrian Behavior Study to Advance Pedestrian Safety in Smart Transportation Systems Using Innovative LIDAR Sensors,” which was awarded $147,000 from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities. The project will investigate the pedestrian behavior at signalized intersections using the state-of-the-art LIDAR sensing technologies and to use this data along with vehicular data to develop a more effective multimodal signal control system. The project runs through Nov. 30, 2021. Kothuri will work with principal investigator Taylor Li, University of Texas Arlington, and co-investigator Xianfeng Yang, University of Utah.
6. Avinash Unnikrishnan, civil and environmental engineering faculty, will serve as principal investigator and Miguel Figliozzi, civil and environmental engineering faculty, and Subhash Kochar, mathematics and statistics faculty, will serve as co-investigators on a project titled “Statistical Inference for Multimodal Travel Time Reliability,” which was awarded $80,000 in funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities. The project is intended to evaluate and develop methods to determine confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for select travel time reliability parameters. The researchers will also study the applicability of existing travel time reliability metrics for class one vehicles (bicycles and motorbikes) and the feasibility of defining an overall travel time reliability of an arterial segment that considers all modes. The project runs through Dec. 31, 2021.
7. Liming Wang, urban studies and planning faculty, will serve as principal investigator and John MacArthur, TREC Sustainable Transportation Program Manager, and Yu Xiao, urban studies and planning faculty, will serve as co-investigators on a project titled “Integrate Socioeconomic Vulnerability for Resilient Transportation Infrastructure Planning,” which was awarded $94,000 in funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities. The objective of this project is to develop a new methodology that incorporates community socioeconomic vulnerability in the evaluation of transportation infrastructure vulnerabilities for cities and regions facing multi-hazards such as the Portland metropolitan area. The project runs through Dec. 14, 2021.