Federal funding for academic research is down across the country, impacting universities from coast to coast. Iowa State University and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) are no exception, though LAS surpassed expectations for fiscal year (FY) 2026, receiving 7% more in research grants than projected.
Despite the overall downward trend in funding, LAS researchers and scholars continue to prioritize groundbreaking discoveries in numerous areas of study, including AI, substance abuse prevention, food insecurity, biomedical research, sustainability, and more.
“Research is fundamental to the mission of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Even in a more challenging funding environment, our faculty continue to pursue discoveries that expand knowledge and create solutions that benefit Iowa and the world, in line with our land-grant mission,” said Gustavo MacIntosh, LAS associate dean for research and graduate education. “Innovation doesn’t stop when funding becomes more competitive. These research projects also provide exciting opportunities for our students to learn while participating in meaningful activities and to prepare them for future careers.”
Following are some examples of LAS research projects that received external funding in FY 2026:
Help for elementary teachers
Evgeny Chukharev, associate professor in the Department of English, received $512,493 from the National Science Foundation to address the challenges of teacher professional development. He is working with co-principal investigator Alina Reznitskaya from Montclair State University in New Jersey, who received a separate $385,877 award from the National Science Foundation related to this project.
Together, they are designing a simulated classroom environment in which elementary school teachers can practice facilitating discussions with AI-driven student avatars. The system will offer multiple low-cost and low-stakes opportunities for teachers to practice facilitation and receive expert-informed feedback from an automated coach. The project will provide a much-needed solution to one of the most pressing issues confronting education today: Scaling up effective pedagogy that fosters students’ skills.
“Critical thinking is a vital skill for academic success and informed citizenship. Yet, many students struggle with constructing well-reasoned arguments or engaging in thoughtful critique of others’ claims,” Chukharev said. “Discussion-based pedagogy offers a promising mechanism for students to develop critical thinking. However, facilitating student discussions is challenging for teachers who must shift from traditional instruction to tracking student arguments, assessing their quality, and providing instructional support – all in real time.”
The project integrates research in AI, argumentation, and teacher learning to create a novel automated professional development system for teachers. A key technological innovation of this system is its hybrid AI architecture – a transparent, rule-based symbolic inference engine that will structure simulated classroom dialogue and provide meaningful feedback to the teacher, while large language models will generate realistic responses from AI-driven student avatars.
In addition to providing high-quality professional development for teachers, this project will inform the design of ethical and transparent AI systems for education.
Preventing substance use among youth in foster care
Maria Schweer-Collins, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, was awarded $3,339,544 from the National Institutes of Health to develop and test an innovative program to prevent substance use among adolescents in foster care by working closely in partnership with the adults who support them – Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASAs).
Research shows that youth in foster care experience an elevated risk for substance use problems compared to youth in the general population, often due to trauma exposure, family instability, exposure to violence and substance use, and experiencing frequent transitions between homes and caregivers.
To address this challenge, Schweer-Collins will lead a five-year collaborative effort to train CASAs, who already work with and advocate for children and young people in the foster care system, to deliver a new evidence-based intervention program that focuses on trauma-informed substance use prevention. The program is called CASA Brief Intervention (CBI).
Schweer-Collins and her research team are currently adapting core components of existing evidence-based interventions and tailoring them to the needs of youth in foster care. Then, they will conduct a large-scale randomized clinical trial in the field to evaluate whether the adapted intervention improves substance use outcomes for foster youth.
“This project fills a critical gap in prevention for adolescents in foster care because there are few substance use prevention programs designed for this age of children and the unique context and realities of foster care” Schweer-Collins said. “Substance use prevention is not routinely addressed for youth who enter foster care and once substance use challenges emerge, research shows only 11% of youth receive the treatment they need. This research addresses this service gap by designing a program that has the potential to reach more youth by building on supportive relationships and infrastructure that already exist.”
CASAs exist in 49 states across the nation, including Iowa, and serve approximately 60% of children in foster care. If this research demonstrates that the prevention program delivered by CASAs improves substance use outcomes, the potential for scaling this approach and expanding access to substance use prevention among youth in foster care is high.
Ensuring a higher corn yield
Joshua Strable, assistant professor in the Department of Genetics, Development, and Cell Biology, received $1,035,762 from the National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research Program to investigate fundamental questions in plant biology concerning floral patterning and meristem termination in maize (corn).
Meristems are specialized stem cell tissues in plants that balance self-renewal and the loss of daughter cells to make organs. In all flowering plants, the floral meristem is tasked to produce the correct type and number of floral organs at the right time and in the right place. In most plants, this terminal differentiation will consume all the cells in the meristem, thus terminating its activity. Proper regulation of floral meristem termination can have major impacts on plant reproduction and yield. For example, in cereal crops like maize, every flower will produce a grain. However, extensive studies on floral meristem progression are lacking. Strable says that despite the vital importance of flower development, little is known about genes, genomic regions, and/or gene regulatory networks that regulate activity of floral meristems.
Strable’s research team will use maize as a model system to understand the developmental basis of floral meristems on the ear. The research will tap into multiple sciences using a core set of classic and new maize floral mutants to identify novel regulators of floral meristem activity and highlight the genomic circuitry that governs floral meristem termination and floral organ development. The study will produce developmentally staged transcriptomes and determine the chromatin and cis-regulatory landscapes across maize floral development, information that will be integrated to infer gene regulatory networks.
Once complete, Strable’s work will generate a resource for the plant sciences and breeding communities that will further enable functional plant genomics, crop improvements, and applied outcomes in agriculture.
“The goal of this research is to generate foundational knowledge on the gene networks that orchestrate floral development in a major global cereal crop such as corn,” Strable said. “In addition, this project involves graduate and undergraduate student researchers, providing opportunities to train the next generation of scientists for careers in genetics, genomics, and molecular biology.”
In addition to recently funded research, several LAS researchers and scholars continue to make new discoveries in research that was funded prior to FY 2026. Here are some examples:
- Yang Yang, associate professor in the Roy J. Carver Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology, was awarded $1,530,000 from the National Institutes of Health to research the fundamental aspects of the coronavirus exoribonuclease (ExoN) complex to develop new therapeutic strategies to fight current and future coronaviruses.
- Aaron Sadow, David C. Henderson Professor and senior scientist with Ames National Laboratory, received $1,540,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a process for converting single-use waste polyolefins (the most common plastics in the world) using low temperatures and low pressure – integrated with separation – to produce Lubricating Oils from Upcycled Plastic waste (LOUPs).
- Ali Jannesari, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, was awarded $420,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop a framework capable of automatically streamlining the scientific software development process on modern high-performance computing systems, supporting the scientific computing, data science, and AI communities.
- Jared Anderson, Alice Hudson Professor in the Department of Chemistry, received $782,553 from the National Science Foundation to develop new approaches and platforms for chemical measurement that exploit the physical and chemical properties of magnetic ionic liquids (MILs) in chemical separation, which could transform fields such as clinical diagnostics, biomedicine, and forensics research.
- Mengdi Huai, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received a $549,938 National Science Foundation CAREER award to improve the trustworthiness of AI deep learning models in high-stakes settings, like the medical field, by improving conformal inference, which helps quantify uncertainty for individual model predictions.