6 Awarded Grants At University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee

SARASOTA, FL — Six faculty members have been awarded grants totaling $39,100 at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee.

The USF Nexus Initiative grants will fund a range of projects including a study on resilience of entrepreneurs in developing economies and interventions for successful refugee integration.

“These impressive projects represent key opportunities for global collaborations that address relevant challenges,” explained Sandra Justice, USFSM’s director of research. “Lessons learned from these projects may have far-reaching benefits, from the development of new practices to strengthen entrepreneurs in Africa to innovative, ground-breaking strategies to potentially help thousands of refugees here and in New Zealand.”

Grant recipients include:

• Thomas Becker, PhD, and Jean Kabongo, PhD, ($11,600) to support their collaborative research project, “The resilience of entrepreneurs in developing economies: Implications for organizational and regional effectiveness.” Becker and Kabongo, both of USFSM’s College of Business, are collaborating with James Abugre Baba of the University of Ghana, Janatti Kyogabiirwe Bagorogoza of Makerere University (Uganda) and Shepherd Dhliwayo of the University of Johannesburg.
• Jody McBrien, PhD, of the School of Education, College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences, ($7,800) to support a collaborative research project with Fred Bemak, PhD, of George Mason University. The project is called “Interventions for successful refugee integration: Welcoming America in New Zealand (Welcoming Communities).”
• Fawn Ngo, PhD, of the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences, ($6,900) for her collaboration with Jose Agustina, of the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain). Their project is called “A cross-national comparative study on the effectiveness of formal and informal responses to the crime of stalking.”
• Giti Javidi, PhD, and Ehsan Sheybani, PhD, both of the College of Business, ($12,800) to support their collaborative project, “Modeling of blockchain, Internet of Things, and the 5th generation (5G) wireless technologies for Smart Cities development.” Sheybani and Javidi are partnering with Stavros Kotsopoulos of the University of Patras and Dmitrios D. Vergados of the University of Piraeus, both in Greece.

"Recipients of the grants were informed last week," said school officials. "The UNI grant program was created in 2018 to enable tenured and tenure-track, full-time research faculty the opportunity to collaborate globally and nationally on scholarly and innovative projects."

The program helps sustain research and scholarship programs with researchers from other institutions and creates opportunities for graduate students to expand their research and scholarly experience, school officials said.

In 2018, the program’s first year, the UNI program granted $330,000 to support 33 national and global research partnerships.