Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory Announce 2025 Seed Grant Winners

September 4, 2025
3 min read

The Office of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) Affairs has announced the winners of the 2025 SBU-BNL Seed Grant Program, with nine awards totaling nearly $600,000.

For 27 years, the Seed Grant Program has served as a vehicle to foster collaboration between the Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory science communities. Scientists from both institutions work in conjunction with colleagues to bring their ideas to life, and these collaborations are a key element for developing synergistic activities that can grow joint research programs aligned with both institutions’ strategic plans.

The program is funded by the Office of the President and Office of BNL Affairs, and BNL provides matching funds for many of the awards. 

The program received 39 applications this year for projects to be conducted jointly by SBU and BNL researchers focusing on research topics of mutual interest. Stony Brook awardees include faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Renaissance School of Medicine, and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

This year’s awardees and research topics include:

  • Jorge Mendez-Mendez (SBU, Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Xi Yu (BNL, Computing and Data Center): Continual learning of agentic AI for scientific applications.
  • Petar Djuric (SBU, Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Susan Minkoff (BNL, Applied Mathematics): Uncertainty-aware perception and sensor fusion for humanoid robots.
  • Pavlos Kollias (SBU, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences) and Benjamin Saliwanchik (BNL, Instrumentation Division): A phased-array bistatic radar network for measuring atmospheric winds.
  • Fang Luo (SBU, Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Soumyajit Mandal (BNL, Instrumentation Division): High-density 2.5D integrated point-of-load converters for extreme environments.
  • Xu Du (SBU, Physics and Astronomy) and Mohamed Boukhicha (BNL, Instrumentation Division): Van-der-Waals ThermoTiles—tunable 2-D thermoelectrics for on-chip hot-spot cooling and heat harvesting in advanced CMOS.
  • Hendrik Hamann (SBU, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences) and Katia Lamer (BNL, Environmental Science and Technology): AI-FUSE—AI-enabled fusion of uneven spatio-temporal evidence.
  • Han Ma (SBU, Physics and Astronomy) and Qiang Li (BNL, Condensed Matter Physics and Material Science Division): Universal scaling behaviors originated from Fermi surface geometry and topology in quantum altermagnetic metals.
  • Chao Chen (SBU, Biomedical Informatics) and Mingyuan Ge (BNL, National Synchrotron Light Source II): Holistic topology-guided 4D tomography for dynamic material analysis.
  • Felix Ringer (SBU, Physics and Astronomy) and Robert Szafron (BNL, Physics Department): AI-based new physics searches at the Electron-Ion Collider.

“This program has proven to be very effective in creating new collaborations between Stony Brook and Brookhaven, many of which have provided finding for grad students and postdocs working jointly between these institutions,” said Associate Vice President for Brookhaven National Laboratory Affairs Richard Reeder. 

“The Seed Grant Program continues to exemplify the power of partnership between Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory,” said Vice President for Research and Innovation Kevin Gardner. “By supporting early-stage, collaborative projects, we’re helping researchers pursue bold ideas that can lead to transformative discoveries and strengthen the shared scientific enterprise of our two institutions.”

The SBU-BNL Seed Grant Program was established in 1998 when Stony Brook began its shared management role for BNL, and is an avenue to launch research that will advance investigators into a position to pursue new external funding. The Office of BNL Affairs oversees the annual Seed Grant.

This year, priority consideration was given to proposals addressing topics related to quantum information science and technology, nuclear and high-energy physics, photon sciences, microelectronics, energy security, AI, and accelerator science and engineering.  In past years, a number of successful proposals have led to millions of dollars in external funding and advancements in research areas closely aligned with SBU and BNL interests.