The internal seed grant program “Seeding Projects for Enabling Excellence & Distinction” (SPEED) aims to spur novel and impactful research, scholarship, and creative practice initiatives led by tenure-track and research faculty in Arts & Sciences. Awards of up to $50,000 support the exploration and development of new scholarly and creative pathways across disciplines within and beyond Arts & Sciences.

This year’s recipients include faculty from biology, physics, performing arts, anthropology, history, and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Their projects will explore innovations in agriculture, more efficient uses of artificial intelligence, and new examinations of American culture and history.

"SPEED grants are one of our most important tools for investing in promising research and creative practice," said Deanna Barch, vice dean of research. "It's exciting to see so many faculty members across Arts & Sciences pursuing ambitious projects that have the potential for transformative outcomes for science and society."

Funding for the projects will last one year, with the expectation that the work will lead to external grant submissions, scholarly publications, or significant presentations and events.

Building Food Resilience by Programming Plant Health
Ram Dixit, the George and Charmaine Mallinckrodt Professor and chair of the Department of Biology, will collaborate with other WashU biologists to create a Plant Health Center that integrates multi-omics data science with AI modeling to program plant systems and develop solutions for agricultural, environmental, and bioeconomy challenges. The center will be developed through three key activities: a symposium to identify critical themes in plant health, a workshop to develop strategic road maps, and site visits to successful research centers to inform grant strategies.

Programmable Quantum Photonic Materials for Energy-Efficient AI
Li Yang, the Albert Gordon Hill Professor of Physics, will study programmable nonlinear quantum materials that embed nonlinear transformations directly within the sensing layer, enabling energy-efficient in-sensor and edge AI. By integrating computational materials discovery, device fabrication, optical characterization, and AI-oriented modeling, the project will demonstrate proof-of-concept, materials-enabled preprocessing for imaging and vision. Yang’s group will also organize an interdisciplinary symposium to unite researchers across quantum materials, photonics, data science, and AI hardware, with the goal of forming collaborative teams and conceptual frameworks for future large-scale centers and funding proposals.

Applying AI to Frontier Problems in Physics
Alex Chen, an assistant professor of physics, will establish a cross-sector, physics-centered AI collaboration hub that positions WashU to compete for large-scale U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission opportunities. Building on the DOE’s Genesis Mission to accelerate scientific discovery through AI-enabled, physics-aware workflows, Chen will convene two targeted workshops. One will identify shared computational and inference bottlenecks across nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. The other will produce two to three submission-ready concept papers and at least one multi-institution proposal blueprint aligned with DOE priorities.

Pine Bluff, AR
Zachariah Ezer, an assistant professor of performing arts, will stage a movement workshop for his play “Pine Bluff, AR.” Written in response to Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” the experimental play uses ergodic and epistolary literature, as well as devised and documentary theater, to examine the experiences of Black people. The work explores how ineffable tragedy is diminished when reduced to a written record and what emerges when that chronicle is embodied once again.

AI and the Future of Expertise: The Case of Art Authentication
Talia Dan-Cohen, an associate professor of anthropology, will explore the growing field of AI art authentication and the controversies surrounding it. She aims to examine what these controversies reveal about the practices and values that motivate connoisseurs and other stakeholders involved in art authentication, and how those practices and values are contested, challenged, or transformed.

Exiled and Excludable: Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the Making of U.S. Sexual Citizenship
René Esparza, an assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, will reframe the history of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift — one of the largest queer and trans migrations in modern history — in a new book. “Exiled and Excludable” argues that queer and trans Cuban refugees occupied a contradictory position. They were vilified by Cuban state propaganda as deviant, classified as “undesirable” under U.S. immigration law, and simultaneously mobilized by LGBTQ organizations and refugee advocates to advance competing visions of belonging. The book will demonstrate how refugees contested their exclusion by forging new forms of solidarity, resistance, and queer cultural citizenship.

American Darkness: Black Men in New York’s Jim Crow Prisons
Douglas Flowe, an associate professor of history, will explore the history of Black men confined in New York prisons, reformatories, and state hospitals during the early 1900s in his book “American Darkness.” Drawing on thousands of prison case files, trial transcripts, institutional reports, and letters sent by incarcerated men to the NAACP, the book reconstructs the lived experiences of Black prisoners from the turn of the 20th century through the New Deal. It reframes early 20th-century imprisonment as a system of racial governance whose effects extended beyond prison walls, shaping Black families, labor, and citizenship long before the rise of the modern carceral state.