Seeds of Ingenuity
October 10, 2025
Powered by gifts to the Arts and Sciences Fund, the Dean’s discretionary fund, the College of Arts and Sciences has launched a new Seed Funding Program in the Office of Research and Innovation. Read on to learn more about two (of many) research projects made possible by the alumni and friends who contribute to the Arts and Sciences Fund annually.
The inaugural Seed Funding Program in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Office of Research and Innovation is nourishing the growth of 11 unique and collaborative research projects across disciplines.
Can emotional regulation techniques used by actors help other individuals process trauma?
How are people using fish antibiotics to treat human illnesses?
These are just two of the questions posed by applicants to the new Seed Funding Program in the College’s Office of Research and Innovation. The program, which supports “creative and bold ideas that not only push boundaries but also yield tangible benefits for our communities and society at large,” attracted 90 research proposals.
“We were thrilled to receive so many excellent applications that showcased the breadth of expertise among our faculty and the imaginative research and scholarly questions that they can address together,” said Kelly Giovanello, senior associate dean for research and innovation in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The program prioritized projects that focused on community transformation, innovative research trends, the involvement of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and interdisciplinary collaboration. Eleven projects received funding in this initial cycle, representing 15% of the total number of applications from each division in the College.
We highlight two of the seed grant projects below.
Learning emotional resilience from actors
As a performer, director and choreographer, Tracy Bersley has undergone her fair share of actor training. As an associate professor of dramatic art and a member of PlayMakers Repertory Company, she’s also been on the other side of the coin, helping to train student actors.
“One thing we talk about a lot in actor training is vulnerability,” Bersley said. “One day, I looked up the definition of vulnerability, and it basically means making yourself susceptible to physical or emotional harm. I realized that’s a really tricky thing we’re asking our students to do.”
Bersley recalled witnessing actors experience something traumatic in a role that they couldn’t shake off. The neurological basis of this fascinated her.
“When you put your body in positions of trauma, the chemicals that are produced tell the body you’re in danger, even if the brain knows it’s just fiction,” she explained. “We don’t have many scientific studies to help us understand how important this is and how necessary it is for actors to take care of their bodies when they’re triggered.”
When it comes to understanding the body’s response to trauma, the theater has always been ahead of the curve, according to Bersley. She pointed to actors’ and playwrights’ intuitive portrayals of emotion — including Shakespeare’s exploration of trauma in Macbeth — as examples. Only recently has neuroscience made it possible to understand why our bodies react to emotion the way they do and how to leverage or counteract these responses to build emotional resilience.
Bersley teamed up with co-investigators Steven Knotek, an associate professor in the School of Education, and Abigail Panter, a professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience, to apply for a seed grant. The researchers thought it was an ideal fit for their multidisciplinary project, which approaches a problem in a unique way that may not appeal to other funders.
“The seed grant felt perfect because it supports these new, path-less-traveled ideas,” Bersley said. “They could blossom into something amazing, but you have to plant the seed first to understand whether or not it’s worth taking forward.”
“When you put your body in positions of trauma, the chemicals that are produced tell the body you’re in danger, even if the brain knows it’s just fiction. We don’t have many scientific studies to help us understand how important this is and how necessary it is for actors to take care of their bodies when they’re triggered.”
— Tracy Bersley
To Bersley, that seed involves the physiological demonstration that the emotion regulation techniques she and her students use can truly bring the body out of a heightened state. In the first phase of their project, she and her colleagues will guide actors through an exercise to induce an extreme emotional response then guide them through three simple emotion regulation techniques. The researchers will monitor participants’ heart rate, sweat production and levels of the stress response hormone cortisol before the emotional response, after the emotional response and after they complete the regulation exercises.
Once they have a baseline understanding of how the exercises affect the body, they aim to assess how the techniques might help people cope with emotional and traumatic situations outside the theater. Bersley stressed that these techniques are easy to learn, quick to complete and can be done using only one’s body and imagination. That makes them incredibly accessible to individuals who struggle for a variety of reasons to access formalized counseling or psychiatric care.
Bersley shared that current and former students regularly tell her how they’ve used exercises from class in situations outside of school. It made her hopeful that these techniques could help people from children to first responders to victims of domestic violence.
“There’s something really exciting about understanding what the brain is doing for your body and for your experience,” she said. “I wanted to use this grant to explore the possibility of applying these tools to populations that can really utilize them.”
Exploring the use of fish antibiotics for human disease
When Jocelyn Chua, an associate professor of anthropology, and Luther Bartelt, an associate professor of medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, learned that some people self-treat their infections with over-the-counter antibiotics intended for use in fish tanks, they wanted to learn why this was happening. They also wanted to explore what it might mean for emerging antimicrobial resistance and antibiotic stewardship, or broad efforts to track and improve how antibiotics are prescribed and used.
“Only recently have there been efforts to understand how, for example, socioeconomic inequalities can actually weaken antibiotic stewardship for already disadvantaged populations,” Chua explained.
“Through a people-centered approach, we want to appreciate the resourceful agency of people who might be excluded from the health care system because of the cost or inaccessibility of health care, or perhaps because of medical mistrust, while documenting the disparities that may severely limit their choices.”
— Jocelyn Chua
Chua and Bartelt wanted to explore the use of these products through both anthropological and pharmaceutical lenses — an approach that didn’t lend itself well to funding mechanisms targeted to either discipline. They teamed up with Brandie Ehrmann, director of the Mass Spectrometry Core Laboratory in the chemistry department, and Heather H. Henderson, an assistant professor of infectious diseases in the UNC School of Medicine, to apply for the seed grant. Bartelt saw the grant as a perfect opportunity to kickstart their project.
“Chemical analyses and ethnographic, qualitative research methods don’t typically mix,” he said. “The opportunity to bring them together was very attractive.”
The qualitative part of the project, assisted by undergraduate researcher Erin Collins, will involve focus groups and interviews with North Carolina residents who have used aquarium fish antibiotics in the past five years. From this research, Chua hopes to better understand how and why they’re seeking out these drugs.
“Through a people-centered approach, we want to appreciate the resourceful agency of people who might be excluded from the health care system because of the cost or inaccessibility of health care, or perhaps because of medical mistrust, while documenting the disparities that may severely limit their choices,” Chua said.
From the chemistry side, the team wants to explore what these fish antibiotics consist of. Since they are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, their quality and composition may vary. Using state-of-the-art chemical analysis equipment, Bartelt, Ehrmann and colleagues intend to determine what active ingredients are in these products, how much there is and what inactive ingredients may be mixed in. This may help individuals choosing to use these products make a more informed decision regarding the potential risks and benefits.
Chua and Bartelt are grateful to the College for supporting early-stage, exploratory projects like theirs that may spur more multifaceted approaches to deepen the discussion around antibiotic use.
“The kinds of questions we’re asking aren’t typically addressed within antibiotic stewardship efforts,” Chua said. “We feel they’re important to developing community-relevant, context-specific solutions to address both antimicrobial resistance and the problem of equitable access to safe medications.”
This program was made possible by gifts to the Arts and Sciences Fund. Learn more about all of the winning projects.
By Calley Jones
