The UNLV Division of Research is pleased to announce the 2026 Faculty Opportunity Awards (FOA) recipients. This year’s awards recognize outstanding faculty research, scholarly, and creative activities that reflect the breadth and excellence of academic innovation at UNLV.

The 2026 FOA recipients are led by 19 faculty investigators from 10 UNLV colleges, schools, and institutes. Their projects represent a broad range of expertise across the School of Public Health, College of Education, College of Fine Arts, College of Liberal Arts, College of Sciences, Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering, School of Integrated Health Sciences, Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine, Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, and the International Gaming Institute. Together, these innovative research efforts demonstrate UNLV's commitment to advancing discovery, addressing complex societal challenges, and improving lives through impactful scholarship.

The Division of Research awarded a total of $297,168.40 through the 2026 FOA program. This year’s competition attracted an outstanding pool of proposals from across the university, showcasing the exceptional quality and diversity of faculty endeavors. The selected projects, along with the PIs and Co-PIs for each award, are listed below.

2026 Faculty Opportunity Award Recipients

• Gabriella Buccini (School of Public Health)
  The Experience of Food Insecurity During Early Childhood and Its Impact on Child Growth and Developmental Trajectories: A Pilot Birth Cohort Study
  Award: $20,000

• Lung-Weng Chen (Department of Environmental and Occupational Health)
  Bridging Water Safety Gaps: A Transformative Mass-Based Platform for Quantifying Micro- and Nanoplastics Across the Urban Water Continuum
  Award: $19,990

• Zhiling Shea (Department of Early Childhood, Multilingual, and Special Education)
  Building an Equitable Evidence Base to Strengthen Early Childhood Mathematics Teacher Preparation in Nevada
  Award: $19,974

• Jung-Hwa Kim (School of Architecture)
  From Spectacle to Sustainability: Mapping the Landscape Legacy of Las Vegas through the Work of Jack W. Zunino
  Award: $18,564

• Yonsu Kim (Department of Health Care Administration and Policy) and Ji Yoo (Department of Internal Medicine)
  A Multifaceted Assessment of Cannabis-Related Respiratory Symptoms: Impacts, Trends, and Public Health Implications
  Award: $30,000

• Chenghui Zhang (Department of Sociology) and Xinyi Situ (Department of Criminal Justice)
  Mobility, Opportunity, and Crime: A Space-Time Analysis of Collective Human Movement in Las Vegas
  Award: $29,820

• Allyson Hindle and Joseph Campanale (School of Life Sciences)
  Visualizing Environmental Resilience in Mammals
  Award: $30,000

• Ronghuai Qi (Department of Mechanical Engineering)
  MRI-Guided Sub-Millimeter Continuum Robots for Medical Interventions
  Award: $20,000

• Sara Rosenkranz (Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition Sciences) and Kara Christensen Pacella (Department of Psychology)
  Assessing Health Behaviors and Mental Well-being Among Adolescents in Online Schools to Inform Scalable Interventions
  Award: $29,370.40

• Maria Paula Castellanos Melendez and Cody Colleps (Department of Geoscience)
  Thermal Fingerprints of Copper Fertility: Pilot Multi-Chronometer Constraints from the Yerington District, Nevada
  Award: $29,450

• Kasra Ghaharian (International Gaming Institute)
  Digital Twins of Gamblers: Validating Synthetic Behavioral Agents for Gambling Research and Industry Application
  Award: $20,000

• Yeunkyun Kim and Neeraj Bhandari (Department of Health Care Administration and Policy), and Soumya Upadhyay (School of Public Health)
  Medicare Shared Savings Program and Telehealth Use Among Beneficiaries with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia
  Award: $30,000

The Faculty Opportunity Awards (FOA) program provides seed funding to support innovative research, scholarly, and creative activities by UNLV faculty. The program is designed to help investigators generate preliminary data, foster new collaborations, and strengthen the competitiveness of future proposals for external funding.

Awards for the 2026 funding cycle begin July 1, 2026, with a two-year project period.

Congratulations to this year's Faculty Opportunity Award recipients for their outstanding accomplishments and their dedication to advancing discovery, innovation, and research, scholarly, and creative activities at UNLV.

For more information about the Faculty Opportunity Awards program, visit the Division of Research website.