Five McKelvey faculty awarded Collaboration Initiation Grants

The program supports collaborative research by junior faculty

Channing Suhl 06.04.2026

Pictured: clockwise from top left, Dai, Fan, Rutz, Xu, Lagunas Vargas

Five faculty in the McKelvey School of Engineering have been awarded $25,000 Collaboration Initiation Grants (CIG) from the school.

The program awards one-year grants to projects that facilitate collaborative research within McKelvey Engineering departments and other university departments for tenure-track McKelvey faculty. The grants are a pathway for faculty to apply for larger interdisciplinary grants, to create a more synergistic project than could be achieved by one researcher in one discipline, and to demonstrate the potential to sustain the collaboration and obtain external funding. Each awardee receives $20,000 from the school and must have $5,000 in cost-sharing from their department or collaborators.

The 2026 CIG winners include:

Yifan Dai, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is collaborating with Yusuke Okuno, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, on the project "Uncovering the electrostatic profiles and non-equilibrium behaviors of biomolecular condensates."
Yingying Fan, assistant professor of electrical & systems engineering, is collaborating with Chong Zu, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, on the project "QuBIC: Miniaturized Hybrid CMOS–Diamond Quantum Platform for Contactless Bioelectromagnetic Sensing."
Alexandra Rutz, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is collaborating with Antonina Frolova, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics & gynecology at WashU Medicine, on the project "Bioelectronic monitoring of human myometrial cells for studying uterine contractility in vitro."
Francisco Lagunas Vargas, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, is collaborating with Robert Wexler, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, on the project "Probing Configurational Complexity in Non-Equimolar Perovskite Oxides."
Lu Xu, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, is collaborating with Nan Lin, professor of statistics & data science in Arts & Sciences and of biostatistics at WashU Medicine, on the project "A Mobility-Informed Framework for Wildfire Smoke Exposure Assessment and Planning.”