$1.2 Million Keck Foundation Bridge Funding Initiative Makes Awards to Early-Career Scientists at UC Davis
The University of California, Davis, is pleased to announce new awards totaling $1.2 million from the Bridge Funding Initiative supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation. This investment will provide critical resources to six high-impact basic science projects during a period when early-stage research often faces significant funding uncertainty. The initiative will enable faculty researchers and graduate students to maintain continuity in their work across science, engineering and medicine.
“This one-time grant program by the Keck Foundation represents an important commitment to supporting and retaining early-career faculty and graduate researchers, strengthening their ability to advance innovative scientific discovery,” said Simon Atkinson, vice chancellor for research at UC Davis. “It also underscores our shared commitment to fostering innovation and supporting the next generation of scientific leaders.”
The selected teams will use the funding to support ongoing experiments, acquire essential research materials, and maintain personnel continuity — elements that enable early-stage projects to thrive and progress toward future external funding and long-term success.
“We are grateful for the Keck Foundation’s support for the exciting and important research efforts of our early career researchers — both faculty and students,” said Davis. “The breadth of these projects is astonishing — from attacking the tiniest viruses to exploring the universe.”
Meet the College of Engineering-affiliated recipients of the bridge funding grant program:
Multiagent AI architecture aims to deliver traceable, constraint-aware reasoning for safety-critical decisions
Modern AI systems excel at producing fluent answers but struggle with reasoning, often failing to detect when their outputs violate fundamental constraints — an issue that makes them unreliable in safety-critical domains such as disaster response, medical triage, and spacecraft operations. Led by Rich Whittle, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, with graduate student Kaisheng Li, the project will investigate how multiagent architectures can achieve transparent, auditable decision-making under uncertainty through distributed, role-based reasoning.
The team is building an AI guidance system modeled on real emergency-operations teams, where specialized agents handle information lookup, simulation, and decision explanation. This allows complex procedures to be broken down into coordinated, constraint-aware steps that can clearly justify each decision.
Molecular determinants governing evolutionary plasticity of flavivirus-host protein interactions
Viruses rely on close virus-host protein interactions to replicate. Similar viral proteins often have similar interactions. Sometimes this relationship breaks down and viral proteins with large differences still have very similar interactions. Led by Priya Shah, Joe and Essie Smith Endowed Professor of Chemical Engineering and an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, along with graduate student Chase L. S. Skawinski, the project aims to understand how certain related viruses — yellow fever virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus and dengue virus—evolve their protein interactions in seemingly counterintuitive ways.
To do this, the team will study two different types of viral proteins, those that are highly similar across the different viruses, and those that are very different. They will see which human proteins these viral proteins attach to. They’ll use advanced tools to filter out background noise so they can focus on the most important connections. They’ll then look for patterns to identify whether specific parts of the viral proteins allow them to maintain protein interactions.
By the end of the project, the researchers hope to learn how viruses evolve new protein interactions. Their findings could point to new treatment strategies for virus infections that currently have no approved therapies.
Biofilms as active architects: Engineering microbial communities to steer subsurface fluid flow and transform transport in complex porous media
Microbial biofilms can dramatically reshape how fluids move through soils and rocks, but we still lack a fundamental understanding of how they alter flow, transport and reactions in the subsurface. The project team led by Verónica L. Morales, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and graduate student Hamidreza Khoshtarash aim to uncover those rules and use them to intentionally steer fluid movement by directing biofilm growth into high-permeability pathways. Through a combination of microfluidic experiments, advanced imaging, and numerical simulations, the team will study how pore-scale structure, microbial traits, and dynamic clogging cycles interact to reroute flow and redistribute fluid phases. The resulting framework for targeted biofilm-flow steering will position microbes not as passive inhabitants but as active tools for controlling subsurface processes, with potential applications in groundwater cleanup, energy storage, and carbon management.
