COMMUNITY OUTREACH

Chicago Street Medicine: Meeting Evolving Needs on the South Side
Grant Amount Awarded: $50,000

UChicago’s chapter of Chicago Street Medicine provides medical treatment and supportive services for the South Side’s unhoused populations. Through weekly street runs, teams of medical student and physician volunteers have delivered care through over 500 clinical encounters and 600 non-clinical encounters in 2024 alone. In the past year, Chicago’s unhoused population has tripled, driven by the influx of newly arrived immigrants. In response, we have expanded our services through initiating a new partnership with New Life Centers’ migrant shelters to care for over 1200 uninsured and undocumented immigrants, especially focusing on unmet pediatric and maternal health needs. This grant will provide crucial support for both this new partnership and for strengthening the foundation of care for all of our patients by expanding our non-clinical resources, providing prescription medications, and establishing electronic record-keeping to improve longitudinal care.

The Next 100 Years of Swift Hall
Grant Amount Awarded: $30,000

Swift Hall, home of the Divinity School, will turn 100 in the 2025-2026 academic year. As we prepare for the next 100 years, we aim to transform a building that was never designed to hold technology into an accessible, modern space that can connect with students, scholars, and lifetime learners. In celebration of the Centennial, the Divinity School will provide infrastructure and technology upgrades to the lecture hall. This iconic space, adorned with hand-carved angels, is the home to critical Divinity School events: lectures, panels, orientation, thesis presentations, etc. The proposed upgrades will make the space accessible to all guests and provide the capabilities to broadcast events to a larger community – something our community craves.

Understanding our City: Celebrating 20 Years of Chicago Studies
Grant Amount Awarded: $26,000

In 2007, Chicago Studies was established with a UCWB grant. Since then, it has become a signature program of the College. In honor of its forthcoming 20th anniversary, we will host an intercollegiate, undergraduate-focused conference celebrating the study of our city. It will solicit presenters of various levels (students, alumni, professional educators and scholars, popular/public historians); will be free and open to the public; and will integrate opportunities for knowledge sharing via storytelling, oral history gathering, community mapping, and collaborative research/publication. The principal goals of the convening are (1) to spark curiosity, promote intergenerational dialogue, and encourage novel partnerships to better understand our remarkable city; and (2) to elevate UChicago’s historical and contemporary profile as a pioneer in place-based urban teaching, learning, and scholarship.

Youth Internship Program: Preparing Future Physicians and Healthcare Professionals
Grant Amount Awarded: $50,000

The Youth Internship Program (YIP) provides South Side high school students with STEM-focused, paid summer internships at UChicago. Since its launch in 2021, YIP has grown from 10 to 74 students in 2024). YIP offers college readiness workshops, career exploration, and internships on two career tracks: health sciences and information technology/computer science. Funding will allow YIP to expand its health track to meet increasing student interest, scale YIP to 100 youth, and enhance interactive health curriculum in partnership with UChicago Medicine. This expansion will enable an additional 26 students to develop new skills, discover potential college options, learn about pathways in medicine, and expand their professional networks with the goal of equipping interns with the confidence and knowledge to pursue careers in healthcare.

ARTS AND CULTURE

A Sprung Dance Floor for Bartlett Area Rehearsal Space
Grant Awarded: $41,000

The Committee on Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) is proposing to install a modular sprung dance floor in Bartlett Area Rehearsal Space (BARS). In recent years, the University has launched a highly successful Dance Program with rapidly growing curricular and co-curricular activities, there are not enough appropriate dance spaces to support the needs of these activities. Over the years, students have sustained injuries due to the hard and uneven flooring in the spaces available to them. Currently, all dance programming enrolls about 1,200 students per year; approximately 2/3 of those meet or rehearse in BARS. A safe floor on which to work is fundamental to the continued flourishing of dance at UChicago

CSO Chamber Music at UChicago Presents
Grant Awarded: $20,000

Beginning in April 2023, with the support of the Office of the Provost and UChicago Arts,  UChicago Presents and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra began a 3-year pilot partnership to present a Sunday afternoon Chamber Music Series of repertoire shaped by the extraordinary musical talents of the CSO and the distinct intellectual and creative work at the University of Chicago. This project was initiated with a suggestion by Mary Lou Gorno, who serves on the University of Trustees, and as the President of the Board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Our hope was that this new series would expand audiences for chamber music by engaging the many communities of the University of Chicago, including our students, faculty, staff, and neighbors. This program has been extremely successful, and we hope to renew the partnership for another three years. We request project support at $10,000 per concert, for two concerts per year.

Chicago Forum Library Initiative
Grant Awarded: $30,000

Currently, the United States is experiencing a wave of book banning that directly contradicts UChicago’s central commitment to free and open inquiry. In our University Avenue building on the quadrangle, The Chicago Forum proposes to create a physical library of banned books and publications on free expression. We would go about this in collaboration with the Regenstein library and have been in discussion with that team. The library would be situated at our front desk space, which gets constant traffic from students, faculty, staff, and guests, and it would also highlight the integral role of free speech in advancing civil rights for everyone, including women. We would note the support of the Women’s Board in signage, furthering the idea that free inquiry and expression should be championed by all.

Protecting Artists’ Creative Works against Generative AI
Grant Amount Awarded: $30,000

Generative AI has transformed society, introducing many benefits. But for artists, generative AI also introduces significant harms. Today’s GenAI models are trained on artwork, photos, writing, music, and other creative works without consent from or compensation for artists. Bad actors target individual creatives by mimicking their style via further fine-tuned models. Our recent projects (Glaze, Nightshade) help protect artists against these harms by introducing “noise” to a digital file (changes to the image pixels) that humans can’t perceive, but which disrupts model training/fine-tuning. Both tools have been widely embraced by artists (8.9M downloads across 160 countries). However, bad actors now use offensive attacks to remove or tamper with the “noise-like” perturbations. We propose to build new tools using “artistic” perturbations (changes to domain-specific artifacts) to provide stronger protection with artistic appearance, e.g. brushstrokes and canvas/acrylic textures.

STUDENT LIFE

Reimagining A Cappella: Producing the Ransom Notes’ Album
Grant Amount Awarded: $15,000

As a decades-old student-run a cappella group, the Ransom Notes have garnered accolades at international competitions and held workshops at high schools throughout Chicago and across the country. We aim to push the traditional bounds of a cappella and use our discography to expand our reach and contributions to the music community, amassing recognition worldwide including the Recorded A Cappella Review Board’s “Single of the Year” last year. This year, we will produce an album in the face of funding limitations from our past sources due to the timescale. Though all arranging/musical composition and recording is done by our own group members, receiving this grant would allow us to hire the professional producers necessary to mix and master our tracks and bring this album, a culmination of our last three years of creative development, to fruition.

Engineering the PULSE-A Cube Satellite
Grant Amount Awarded: $30,000

PULSE-A is the first-ever undergraduate-led initiative at the University of Chicago to design, build, and fly a small satellite. We provide the largest opportunity on campus for project-based engineering education, with all mechanical and electrical hardware designed and manufactured by our team of 66 undergraduate students. In doing so, PULSE-A facilitates unique avenues for teamwork, leadership, and STEM-focused community outreach. In 2024, PULSE-A secured a fully-funded launch opportunity from NASA worth $300,000; however, this funding cannot be applied to development costs. The resulting budgetary shortfall leaves the project’s future in jeopardy. Funding from the Women’s Board will be used to cover all student-designed mechanical and electrical hardware for both the satellite and the ground station, allowing students to continue their design and manufacturing work in the 2025-2026 school year.

Student Policy Challenge
Grant Amount Awarded: $25,000

The nonpartisan Institute of Politics (IOP) is committed to fostering in our students a passion for public service, meaningful dialogue and active engagement in our democracy. We have found there is no better way to understand policy making than hands-on practical experience. This is why twice a year, IOP hosts a policy challenge for students of all levels and academic specializations, seeking solutions for local, federal or global problems. We will run two policy challenges next academic year, one in the fall and one in the spring. Acting as teams, students will be challenged to develop a plan to address a specific policy question. The contest is open to all students and no prior policy background or coursework is required. Students will compete in teams of two to five participants and present proposals to a panel of experts and each member of the winning team receives a cash prize.

The Year of Games: A University-Wide Project
Grant Amount Awarded: $40,000

The Year of Games is an interdisciplinary, University-wide project to celebrate the past, present, and future of games at the University in 2025-26. Gaming has surpassed the music and film industries in global revenues. Media Arts & Design (MADD) has become the fastest growing Humanities major. UChicago students combine game studies with business, computer science, and the arts, applying criticality, innovating the field, and forging new employment pathways. To be competitive, UChicago must cement a reputation as the leading destination for critical game design studies. This moment will amplify the groundbreaking study of games happening here and nowhere else. The Year of Games, organized by the Library, Humanities, MADD Center, Cinema & Media Studies, Logan Center, and other partners, will include symposia, programs, and career events for students.

SCIENCE FACULTY RESEARCH & SUPPORT 

Physics-Informed AI for Breast Cancer MRI Screening
Department of Radiology
Grant Amount Awarded: $50,000

Artificial intelligence (AI) has enhanced breast MRI but the combination of AI with MRI is not yet accurate enough to be used for routine breast cancer screening.  We propose to significantly improve conventional MRI by using AI to measure tissue microstructure, tumor blood supply, cell density, and cellular metabolism from specialized images.  These are all important markers for cancer and cancer aggressiveness and can be used to find cancer early when it is most responsive to therapy.  These markers can also guide design of effective therapy for each patient. We will use a novel AI method based on biological and physical models of tissue (referred to as “physics-informed” AI or PIA) to measure these tissue properties.  This will be the first time that artificial intelligence and PIA are used to quantitatively measure tissue properties to screen for breast cancer.  This new method will save lives and guide treatment to achieve the best outcomes for patients.

Drug Repurposing for Treatment of Brain Tumors
Department of Neurosurgery
Grant Amount Awarded: $40,000

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive and treatment-resistant brain tumors. Each year, approximately 15,000 Americans receive a GBM diagnosis, and over 10,000 die from GBM. The average life expectancy is less than 15 months and has remained virtually unchanged for decades. The development of new treatments for GBM is extremely expensive and time intensive. The Yamini Lab is working to change this paradigm. We have found a specific protein in these tumors that can be targeted to enhance tumor sensitivity to chemotherapy and block tumor growth. Importantly, to target this protein, we use a cost- and time-effective approach of repurposing FDA-approved drugs in a similar manner to what is done for the treatment of dementia. With the funding of the Women’s Board Grant, we will translate this research from bench to bedside, changing the GBM treatment landscape.

Controlling Lung Cancer Metastasis through Metabolic Interventions
Department of Hematology & Oncology
Grant Awarded: $40,000

More people will die from lung cancer than any other tumor type. This lethality is partly due to the ability of lung cancer cells to spread to distant organs and cause extensive tissue dysfunction. If we can limit the ability of these cells to spread, we can significantly improve patient outcomes. While it is well-understood that altered metabolism supports malignant cell growth, we have discovered that metabolic reprogramming plays a key role in how cancer cells spread to distant organs.
We will examine how aggressive lung cancers use unexpected nutrients to support aggressive behavior, and when we inhibit this nutrient use, lung cancer cells lose their ability to spread. This proposal seeks to understand the mechanisms by which this occurs, and leverage the finding into a therapeutic opportunity.

Protecting Artists’ Creative Works against Generative AI
Department of Computer Science
Grant Awarded: $30,000

The Great Lakes hold 20% of Earth’s freshwater — an essential and scarce resource. They are also home to unique biodiversity, especially in the tiniest organisms: the microbes. Microbes are sentinels of change and control water quality. With support from the Women’s Board in 2014, we established the first-ever long-term study of Great Lakes microbes and discovered hundreds of new microbial species. Now in our 11th year, we are poised to move beyond the descriptive cataloging phase to a new phase, focused on predicting ecosystem change. We will use our one-of-a-kind long term dataset and new technologies to 1) understand how unique Great Lakes species contribute to ecosystem health; and 2) predict which species are most at risk from climate change.

HUMANITIES FACULTY RESEARCH & SUPPORT 

Entangled Economies: Sovereign Wealth Funds Reshaping US-China Power Relations
Department of Sociology
Grant Awarded: $49,000

Since the 2008 financial crisis, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) from nations like China and Kuwait have injected billions into the global economy, becoming tools of economic influence. Nationally, SWFs align financial power with foreign policy goals, challenging liberal democratic capitalism. Locally, foreign ownership through SWFs dilutes domestic shareholders, creating tensions between elites and foreign investors. This project maps networks linking China and the U.S., using primary sources and 180,000 leaked emails. It uncovers how state-backed capital reshapes global power and intertwines with political elite interests in both nations.

Roman Statutes: Renewing Roman Law
Department of Classics
Grant Awarded: $35,000

This project will produce the first comprehensive, open-access repository of all extant Roman laws, with introduction, edition, translation and commentary. With 18 collaborators in 7 countries, the result will revolutionize scholarship in Roman history, public law, comparative constitutionalism, and political theory at an international level. The five-year project has received funding from the Delmas Foundation (year 1, for a bibliographic database), the National Endowment for the Humanities (years 1-3, three years’ salary for a digital humanities specialist), and Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium (years 1-3, in support of editorial meetings). We seek the support of the Women’s Board to fund the final two years of work by our digital humanities specialist. This will bring the project to completion, facilitating access by scholars across all the fields that are relevant to this resource.

The Divided Argument Podcast: Promoting Civil Discourse on the Supreme Court
Law School
Grant Awarded: $10,000

The Constitutional Law Institute promotes research and dialogue that honors the university’s commitment to free speech and independent intellectual inquiry, free from partisan influence. We produce a hit podcast, Divided Argument, focused on one of America’s most important institutions: the Supreme Court. As former clerks for Supreme Court Justices, we bring our expertise and differing viewpoints to offer listeners a nuanced understanding of the highest court in the land. Our conversations are accessible and show the value of reasoned discussion as a way to navigate disagreements, a model sorely needed in our current politicized environment.