The University of Iowa College of Dentistry is pleased to announce the 2025 Seed Grant Awards.
This is the fifth year of the seed grant program, and these grants fund innovative projects from early-career investigators or established investigators who are developing a new line of research. The goal of these grants is to encourage research and generate data that will enable the awardees to be competitive for peer-reviewed national funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health.
Seed grant awardees and applicants have become a major driving force of the collegiate research enterprise.
The five projects selected this year are sure to continue this trend.
The college would also like to express our appreciation for the College's Research Proposal Advisory Panel, for their time and effort on the seed grant program:
Jeffrey A. Banas, PhD (Chair), Professor, Pediatric Dentistry, IIOHR Director, Oral Science Graduate Program Director
Azeez Butali, BDS, PhD, Professor of Oral Pathology, Radiology and Medicine
Peter C. Damiano, DDS, MPH, Bernstein Professor, Preventive & Community Dentistry
Liu Hong, MD, MS, PhD, Professor of Prosthodontics
Kyungsup Shin, DMD, PhD, Associate Professor, Orthodontics, Director of Clinical Research
Erica C. Teixeira, DDS, PhD, Associate Professor and Chair, Operative Dentistry
George J. Weiner, MD, C.E. Block Chair Professor, Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center
Each 2025 Seed Grant proposal was reviewed and evaluated by the College of Dentistry Research Proposal Advisory Panel (RPAP), and award amounts for the proposals were based on the panel’s review and scoring of the proposals, the requested budget, and the available funds.
Based on these criteria, the 2025 Seed Grant Awards are:
Azeez Butali
The Gilbert E. Lilly Professor of Diagnostic Sciences
Project Title: "Whole genome Sequencing of Noma Triads from Africa"
Co-Investigator: Erliang Zeng
Shareef Dabdoub
Assistant Professor in the Division of Biostatistics and Computational Biology
Project Title: "Illumninating the PFAS: Consequences of Exposure on Oral Health"
Co-investigator: Sukirth Ganesan
Sivaraman Prakasam
Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Periodontics
Project Title: "Role of opsons in shaping plaque microbiome and gingival immunity"
Co-investigators: Sukirth Ganesan and Shareef Dabdoub
Fan Shao
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Project Title: "The roles of Sox2 in lineage specification of dental epithelial stem cell"
Co-Investigator: Huojun Cao
Cristina Vidal
Assistant Professor of Operative Dentistry
Project Title: "Unraveling how the oral microbiome engages host MMPs in moderate and advanced dental caries"
Co-investigators: Shaoping Zhang and Jeff Banas