Research Grants

Joe McHugh was awarded a $1.2 million NSF grant in collaboration with Dr. Luiz Felipe Lima Da Silveira (Western Carolina University) and Kathryn Stanger-Hall (UGA). The four-year project is titled, “Deploying integrative systematics to untangle Lucidota, the Gordian knot of Neotropical firefly taxonomy.” This project will document the major firefly groups across South America, utilizing specimens in museum collections and newly available material provided by a network of Brazilian and Colombian collaborators who collected fireflies across all major regions of the Neotropics, day and night throughout the year. Furthermore, the project will involve students at all stages and produce broadly trained biologists capable of leading biodiversity exploration in the future.

Babu Srinivasan was recently awarded a USDA-NIFA-CPPM grant for $300,000 for using semiochemicals, trap crop, and visual cues in a push-pull strategy to control whitefly in cucurbits and tomatoes. He was also awarded a grant from the BARD US-Israel Agricultural Research and Development Fund (US-IS BARD) for $310,000 to work to research identifying virus interacting proteins in whiteflies and a Clay-based RNA interference approach for whitefly and virus management.

Lewis Bartlett is a co-PI for a $4 million USDA-NIFA-SCRI grant and will receive approximately $400,000 for UGA to conduct research efforts to develop and deploy novel tools to support Varroa mite IPM for enhancing honey bee health for pollinating specialty crops.

Shayla Salzman was recently awarded the Shimadzu Equipment Grant for Education and Research for $60,000 from Shimadzu Scientific Instruments.