a2ru Challenge Grants Catalyze Interdisciplinary Student Research

Feb 5, 2026

At the end of each year’s Emerging Creatives Student Summit, a2ru presents the students attending with a special additional opportunity: an invitation to apply for a Challenge Grant. These competitive grants provide funding for student groups to pursue an interdisciplinary project sparked at the Summit, as well as the opportunity to present the project at a2ru’s national conference, with additional financial support for travel.

“Resonate: Making Waves,” the 2025 Emerging Creatives at Georgia Tech, yielded an unprecedented eight Challenge Grant applications, and there were so many strong ones in this pool that we awarded two Challenge Grants. For those runner-up teams we couldn’t fund, we attempted to find other sources of support at their home institutions.

One winning team—Richie Arndorfer, Eliana Gelman, Nicholas Myers, and Jeanne Marie Martineau, all from the University of Georgia—proposed HeartSong, a project to develop a group-based singing biofeedback system that both translates heart rate variability data into images and composes music in real time. Using sensors, real-time visuals, and live-looped vocals, they sought to transform nervous system data into a collaborative art experience—part meditation, part musical composition. The project embodied the intersection of its four team members’ interests and expertise: voice as cultural expression, music composition that responds to audio and data in real time, group vocalization and cognition, and human-computer interaction.

The second winning team proposed Salt: A Ripple Effect, a participatory experience incorporating scientific research, visual arts, and performance to deepen public understanding of the chemical consequences of winter de-icing methods. The team wanted to explore the effects of a tiny grain of salt, for a general public with only a basic scientific background. The three team members—Luisa Chavarria from Michigan State University (MSU), Ji Eun Lim from Boston University, and Adina Shaikh from the University of Wisconsin-Madison—brought expertise in Earth sciences, museum exhibits, puppet-making, workshop facilitation, music, and neuroscience to the project.

Both winning Challenge Grant teams worked over the summer and fall, facing the same challenges that many interdisciplinary teams do: complicated schedules and competing commitments (classes!), communication across distance, and shifting goals and expectations. Gala Gonzalez Barrios, a PhD student at Virginia Tech and one of the winners of the 2024 Challenge Grant, volunteered to mentor the two winning teams, sharing the insight she and her team gained as they navigated the same obstacles.

a2ru conference attendees from Penn State University participate in the HeartSong vocalization activity.

The teams’ efforts culminated in an interactive gallery/poster session at the a2ru national conference at University of Wisconsin-Madison in October, 2025. The conference provided the teams with both an incentive to reach project milestones and a source of new ideas; the HeartSong team reflects, “[the conference] motivated us to get a working demo prototype ready that we probably would not have created otherwise, and which has ended up being a really important step in the project. The people, speakers, and attendees present had wonderful feedback and connections for us to explore going forward.”

For the Salt: A Ripple Effect team, the next step is already in place; their project will be part of the exhibition The Science of Salt at the newly re-opened MSU Museum. In a lovely full-circle moment, MSU is hosting Emerging Creatives 2026 in March and the MSU Musuem will be our base of operations; this year’s participants will have an inspiring example of where their collaborative efforts can go.

Top Image: “Salt: A Ripple Effect” team member Ji Eun Lim operates the crankie theater as part of the team’s display at the a2ru conference.