Case Study: From Bootcamp to Discovery
Corinne Richards-Zawacki
Corinne Richards-Zawacki is a Big Proposal Bootcamp success story. A professor in the Dietrich School’s Department of Biological Sciences, she participated in the 2020 Big Proposal Bootcamp and won the pitch day competition prize. That pitch became the core of a successful proposal to NSF for a five-year $12.5 million grant to develop a biology integration institute and allow Pitt to collaborate with researchers at eight other institutions—including the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts Boston—to study amphibian resilience to disease threats.
The institute—Resilience Institute Bridging Biological Training and Research, or RIBBiTR (frogs are at the center of the work)—integrates researchers across sub-disciplines in biological sciences to better understand how living systems achieve resilience to emerging infectious diseases and other global change stressors.
The teams have successfully developed shared protocols for field data collection and are completing a second year of field data collection in locations as far-flung as Pitt’s Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology, where Richards-Zawacki is director, and California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, Central Panama and the Atlantic Forest of Brazil.
Researchers are sifting through decades of data laying the foundation for a database that is updated in real time with data recorded on smartphones using an app that works even from remote field sites. The team also is detecting rare species using automated acoustic monitoring devices developed at Pitt.
“We detected a critically endangered species— Atelopus varius—in a site where we had not seen it for many years,” Richards-Zawacki says. The teams also developed a new method for detecting chytridiomycosis (a fungal disease) and can tell if a frog is infected in remote field sites in real time. Richards-Zawacki calls it “a game changer.”
RIBBiTR also offers training and education, a core requirement of most big grants. Research experiences for undergraduates at five institutions include a program linking biology and chemistry; along with workshops for graduate students and postdocs in Brazil and Costa Rica. High school students from Pittsburgh Public Schools also are doing research as part of the Gene Team, an initiative of NSF Includes centered at Pitt.