Campus News
CITRIS Interdisciplinary Innovation Program (I2P) funds three campus projects
The 2025-26 edition requested projects focused in three areas: Society, Media and Technology, AgTech, and EdTech.
The CITRIS Interdisciplinary Innovation Program (I2P) provides UC Santa Cruz Principal Investigators with funding for projects focused on developing information technology solutions to significant societal challenges. The 2025-26 edition requested projects focused in three areas: Society, Media and Technology; Agricultural Technology–AgTech; and Educational Technology–EdTech. The program received a strong field of proposals and the review committee chose three projects for funding. The projects include a wide range of campus expertise, with project teams including PIs from eight departments.
The program runs annually, with a submission period during the summer quarter. This year’s three funded projects are:
Understanding Computational Thinking and Skill Development with Large Language Models, with PI Leilani Gilpin, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, co-PI assistant professor of psychology Hannah Hausman, and co-PIs Matt Wagers and Pranav Anand, both professors of linguistics. The project will develop a pilot study with the goal of understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) affect computational thinking in an entry-level research environment. Study participants will complete programming tasks while multimodal behavioral data is recorded (eye fixations, mouse clicks, keystrokes, speech, and gestures), followed by reflective narration of their work. Half of the participants will use an LLM; the other half will use a search engine. The research team will evaluate the study with a questionnaire and by measuring recall, inference, and application skills. The outcome of this proposal will be a model that predicts mastery based on participant behavioral data. The toolchain they propose to construct for collecting and analyzing multi-modal data is something they believe would be readily applicable to a wide swath of educational tasks.
Equitable Environmental Sensing for Sustainability, with PI Colleen Josephson, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and co-PI Crystele Leathaud, from the Center for Agroecology. The project aims to develop and field-test a low-cost, open-source environmental sensing platform co-designed with small growers to support equitable climate adaptation. This interdisciplinary team will integrate wireless sensor design, participatory research, and cooperative extension. The platform will monitor key parameters such as soil moisture, microclimate, and sensor status to inform irrigation decisions.
REMEDIATE: Integrated Air and Soil Monitoring for Community-Engaged Disaster Response and Recovery, with PI Javier Gonzalez-Rocha, assistant professor of applied mathematics, co-PI Adina Paytan, professor of earth and planetary sciences, and co-PI Tamara Ball, lecturer and director of experiential learning at the Baskin School of Engineering and Rachel Carson College. By integrating airborne and surface-level data, this team seeks to better understand the deposition and distribution of contaminants across impacted landscapes. This combined approach—sensor networks paired with targeted in-situ soil sampling—will generate more complete, time-resolved environmental assessments, rapidly identify environmental hotspots, inform mitigation, and guide future testing in other at-risk communities. By linking responsive air modeling with deployable X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) technology, this system supports fast, cost-effective, and community-responsive environmental assessments that are difficult to achieve with traditional top-down monitoring methods.
Future CITRIS funding opportunities
The UC-wide CITRIS Core Seed Funding program will invite proposals from teams that must include researchers from two or more of the UC CITRIS campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Davis Health, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz. The 2026 request for proposals is scheduled to open in February. For more information, please visit https://citris-uc.org/core-seed-funding/ or watch an information session recording on the website.
CITRIS at UC Santa Cruz also funds student projects and events through the Tech for Social Good program and invites applications for its technology track until November 15, 2025.
In addition, CITRIS at UC Santa Cruz offers the CIDER Drone Pilot Training, a mentoring and education program to train students in the safe and comprehensive use of drones, with a special focus on agricultural and environmental applications. The program is open for applications now through November 3, 2025.