Emerging Areas and Seed Funding

“Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination.”

– Jonah Lehre

Change HI’s emerging areas and seed funding activities respond to two priorities identified in Hawaiʻi’s Statewide Science and Technology Plan: Data science innovation and technology transfer and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander inclusion and equity in the Hawaiʻi data science endeavor.

Our Programs

Emerging Areas

Change HI will foster commercialization of data science and climate technologies that have not been a significant part of University of Hawaiʻi (UH) technology transfer activities historically, and provide professional development in entrepreneurship and technology translation for Change HI participants.

Seed Funding

The goals of the seed funding program are to foster indigenous data science. The program aims to use and explore insights available from contemporary and historical indigenous data sets, support data science performed by teams that include indigenous persons, support collaboration between indigenous and data science researchers, support community co-produced data science and convene conversations about data sovereignty and decolonization of data science. 

Requests for proposals (RFPs) will be released annually through Hawaiʻi EPSCoR and the UH Office of Indigenous Innovation.

Focus Areas:

  • Projects that convene critical conversations on data sovereignty
  • Projects that explore contemporary and historical data sets
  • Projects that explore community co-production of data analytics and visualization

Meet the Team

Leadership

Jason Leigh

UH Mānoa

Emerging Areas

Alex Stokes
Steve Auerbach
John Burns

UH Mānoa

UH Mānoa

UH Hilo

Seed Funding

Kamuela Enos
Rosie Alegado

UH Mānoa

UH Mānoa