Interdisciplinary team to explore stress response with major NSF award

A team of faculty from departments across three disciplines will use an almost $2 million National Science Foundation award to study how environmental stressors initiate and prime stress responses, and when those responses influence an animal’s ability to pass genes to next generations. The goal is to uncover answers to fundamental questions about stress resistance and resilience and create models to predict the persistence of populations in the face of stressors experienced in their environments.

The project is led by Haruka Wada, assistant professor of biological sciences, with co-principal investigators Vinamra Agrawal, assistant professor of aerospace engineering; Todd Steury, associate professor of forestry and wildlife sciences; and Tonia Schwartz, assistant professor of biological sciences. The four-year project is titled “Integrating engineering theory and biological measures to model stress resilience, damage and fitness-related consequences.”

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