From cyberattacks that can shut down power grids to gaps in global women’s health data, today’s most urgent challenges rarely fit neatly within a single discipline. At the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), two faculty members are tackling these complex issues with support from the Pitt Momentum Funds (PMF), an internal funding initiative designed to accelerate high-impact research and facilitate collaboration across the university.
Dr. Erica Owen, associate professor at SPIA, received funding for her project, “Certified Security: Bridging Technology and Policy to Protect Critical Infrastructure.” The project unites collaborators from the School of Computing and Information (SCI) and the Swanson School of Engineering, with the goal of developing a framework to close the gap between cybersecurity technologies and policy support.
Owen and her collaborators are supported through a PMF Teaming Grant– one-year awards of up to $60,000 that support the formation of new collaborations aimed at pursuing large-scale external funding. Over the next year, the team will conduct stakeholder interviews across industry and policy, produce two policy memos as applied use cases, and host a strategic planning workshop at the University of Pittsburgh aimed at building a broader research network.
“What excites me most is the opportunity to extend this work beyond energy,” Owen said. “The Cyber Energy Center has given us a strong foundation, but the problem spans every critical infrastructure sector. With this support, we can build a team and a framework that travels across sectors and establish Pitt as the place where technical and policy communities come together to solve these problems.”
Owen noted that the funding also enables her team to build on existing strengths at the University of Pittsburgh and in the region. “Pitt and Pittsburgh are a natural home for this work, with expertise across critical infrastructure sectors both on campus and in the regional industry community. This funding lets us build on that foundation and grow.”
SPIA Associate Professor Dr. Müge Kökten Finkel, director of the Ford Institute for Human Security and co-director of the Gender Inequality Research Lab (GIRL), is also part of a project receiving PMF Teaming Grant support. She joins a cross-school collaboration titled “Building the Female Digital Health Twin Global Alliance,” led by Vanathi Gopalakrishnan of the School of Medicine with additional collaborators from SCI and the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS).
The team will design and launch the Female Digital Health Twin Global Alliance (FDHT-GA), a first-of-its-kind global framework for women's health innovation. Bringing together clinicians, AI and data scientists, and women's health and policy experts, the effort aims to create inclusive, trustworthy, and globally interoperable digital models of women’s health trajectories across the life course.
“I am thrilled to collaborate with such talented colleagues across the university’s schools and departments,” Finkel said. “These interdisciplinary partnerships are where transformative work can take shape– when different ways of seeing a problem come together, new possibilities for addressing it emerge. I look forward to contributing to the project’s focus on global policy and gender equity, helping to advance both the scientific and societal dimensions of digital health innovation and to help position the University of Pittsburgh at the forefront of equitable, data-driven innovation in women’s health.”
By supporting projects like Owen’s and Finkel’s, the Pitt Momentum Funds program helps faculty build the partnerships and preliminary work needed to pursue larger-scale research initiatives—advancing the University of Pittsburgh’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and real-world impact. Explore the full list of Teaming Grant awardees here.