Schiller-Funded Grants Bring BC Research to Worldwide Problems

By Stephanie M. McPherson | November 2025

The Schiller Institute is dedicated to helping Boston College researchers translate their work into solutions for some of the world’s greatest problems. To make this possible, the Institute offers seed-level grants to researchers engaging in interdisciplinary work in the core areas of energy, health, and the environment.

Recipients of the 2025-2026 Schiller Institute Grants gathered on September 12 to update one another on progress made in the months since their grant terms began in June.

Laura J. Steinberg, the Seidner Family Executive Director, welcomed the principal investigators and their research teams to the event, noting the importance of interdisciplinarity not only within the project teams, but also across project teams at events such as this meeting.

Steinberg addressed the group, saying "We're glad you're here to share your research, and also to offer support and suggestions to your fellow grantees. We are quite intentionally a multi-disciplinary group. We've seen in past years that these gatherings tend to generate a real appreciation of each other's work and inspire deeper exploration of each of your own projects."

The Schiller Institute’s goals extend beyond creating a network of professionals. They hope that funding innovative interdisciplinary research will provide extracurricular educational opportunities for the next generation of researchers.

“You learn a lot in lecture classes, but you learn three times as much from something like this,” says Ashley Waldron, a senior Human-Centered Engineering major who is working with Amin Mohebbi, Associate Professor of Practice in the Engineering department on his work creating a model to predict near-future water availability in the Sahel region of Africa. “You’re so much more prepared to move on, whether you go into post-grad education or straight into the workforce. I’ve learned a lot of skills [working on this project] that I pretty much never would have picked up from regular coursework.”

Mohebbi was one of nine principal investigators to present during the fall gathering, and each presenter highlighted the significant contributions of their students, from painstaking pipetting to thorough literature reviews. Some PIs even gave a large chunk of their ten-minute presentation slots over to the undergraduates and graduate students who put in the work over the summer.

For students at all levels, being involved in such pilot scale projects as those supported by these grants provides a different perspective of their fields. For example, PhD student Sophia Eisenberg has been able to understand the landscape of the Boston social work scene after her years in Chicago, thanks to her research under Professor of Social Work Cathy Taylor’s Schiller grant.

“I’ve been able to work with two of our community partners at large behavioral health agencies and learn a lot about the system that they’re navigating in Massachusetts,” says Eisenberg. “I am committed to doing whatever I can to make my research as digestible to community members as possible, hoping to maximize the impact.”

The Schiller Institute offers two categories of grant opportunities. Grants for Exploratory Collaborative Scholarship (SI-GECS) must be new collaborations among BC faculty members from different disciplines, with awards being divided into two sub-types depending on the level of funding needed. Grants for Research in Targeted & Emerging Areas (SI-RITEA) supports grants focused on the Global South (Type A) or collaborations with a US-based, non-academic partner (Type B).

Read on for more information about some of this year’s projects, and visit the SI-GECS and SI-RITEA pages on the Institute’s website for a full overview.

Research-Practice Collaboration to Improve Children’s Behavioral Health

Best practices for behavioral health interventions should be informed by the most up to date research – but that research is often out of reach for the clinicians responsible for developing and implementing those interventions.

“There can be really a big delay between the science and actually having evidence-based practice understood, translated and implemented,” says Taylor. “There's lots of reasons for that gap… lack of access to research evidence or difficulty in the translation or not being sure how to implement it.”

With their SI-RITEA grant, Taylor, Eisenberg, and their team are developing ways of getting the insights from university studies into the hands of the clinicians who make a difference in the world.

They spent the summer since their grant period began developing and deploying focus group questionnaires with local behavioral health organizations to understand specific barriers to research access. For example, journals’ paywalls keep new information from non-academic audiences. That hurdle can be overcome by partnerships between academics and practitioners, but those that have existed in the past tended to be short lived based on the term of an academic project. And even when organizations have access to the research, they are often so short staffed it is difficult for them to devote necessary time and resources to training.

Taylor and team hope this information can inform the development of best practices for creating long standing partnerships and access to expertise.

“One of the ideas was for there to be a way that the agencies could reach out to faculty based on their interests and needs and vice versa,” Taylor says. “Also, agencies cited the desire to be able to have [a] one stop place to look for research evidence.”

One way to address these needs would be through a digital portal, which Taylor and her team have begun to develop with the company Scalable Care, which creates web-based platforms designed to connect researchers and caregivers.

Taylor has used the data collected over the summer as a foundation for a larger grant application to further this work, and put out a call to faculty during the presentation for expertise input as they develop the resources that will be available on their Scalable Care platform.

“These pilot programs are a great space to test [ideas] out and to get feedback from the community,” says Eisenberg. “So that when you are applying to bigger programs for more money, it is more informed with actual community need from the beginning.”

A Catalytic Approach to the Total Conversion of Lignocellulosic Biomass to Simple Sugars and Anhydrosugars

Biofuels and bioplastics hold great potential for a future independent from fossil-fuel-based products. But much of the stock to make these bio-bases comes from typical food crops, and so using them would either reduce food availability or increase arable land use. Lignocellulosic biomasses, the focus of this grant, are derived from tough, reedy, non-food plants (such as bamboo or switchgrass) or agricultural waste products that can be converted into biofuels.

“This minimizes competition with food production and avoids the ethical and environmental issues associated with converting farmland to industrial use,” say Niu and Salifu in a joint comment. “Additionally, valorizing lignocellulosic biomass supports a circular bioeconomy by turning low-value or waste feedstocks into high-value sustainable products, thereby reducing dependence on fossil resources and lowering carbon emissions.”

Right now, lignocellulosic biomasses are broken down into cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The former two can be converted into fuel, but so far lignin has been wasted.

Niu, Salifu, and team are developing a catalyst that could break lignin down into something that can also be used for biofuels. Through the summer months, the researchers combed through the literature to identify biochemical bonds in lignin that could be broken down into smaller parts, which could then be broken down further into sugars available for biofuels.

Upon discovery of appropriate bonds, Niu’s team began work on a catalyst to successfully derive biofuel-ready sugars from this former waste product. They were able to use a technique involving concentrated applications of ultraviolet light to break the lignin down into simple molecular formations. Salifu’s team was then able to show that these can be further converted into the sugars needed to create bioplastics and biofuels.

“Collectively, these results have validated the feasibility of our proposed workflow and set us up for developing an optimized and scaled up workflow for industrialization of our approach,” says Niu.

Niu and Salifu appreciate the support from Dunwei Wang, Professor of Chemistry, who donated his and his group’s time and effort to this work.

Assessing fungal diversity and viability in sewage and wastewater treatment systems

Sewage waste is a valuable tool for understanding which diseases or contaminants are circulating within a community. Viral and bacterial diseases in sewage have been fairly well studied, but fungi are understudied both in the context of wastewater and their microbial communities in general. Hoar and Hilbert’s grant-funded work is characterizing what fungi are present in Boston-area wastewater and determining how viable the fungi remain after being subjected to wastewater treatments.

“Ultimately we want to take samples coming into wastewater treatment plants, so raw sewage as well as samples throughout the treatment process to get a better sense from the engineering side of what processes are effective or not effective removing these pathogens,” says Hoar.

The researchers and their teams spent the summer assessing raw sewage samples from two treatment plants to determine if fungal DNA was present. Because there are no commercially available assays designed to extract fungal DNA from wastewater, they modified existing kits meant for soil or other sources of water. They designed a control study to ensure their sampling was correct: they spiked some wastewater with a specific amount of a type of fungus not usually found in wastewater, then used their modified assay to measure that fungal amount. If they got a result mirroring what they knew they added, they could trust the amounts of other species that the assay identified. In initial tests, amounts came back lower than what they had added, so they are currently optimizing the assay.

Next, they will use the assay to determine the types of fungi present in the wastewater and determine they are still alive and active. They eventually plan to run the tests on water taken from multiple points in the treatment system to see if treatment methods are as effective at fungal removal as they are for other contaminants.

“The cell wall just makes it really, really hard to kill these in comparison to lots of other types of pathogens,” says Hilbert. “And so that’s part of what we’re curious about.”