Grant Program

Overview & CFPs Funded Projects Grant Recipients Upcoming Events

About

The DTD Lab supports projects from UVA faculty connected to the DTD Lab’s mission of understanding the intersections of democracy and digital technology, including how rapidly evolving digital technologies and artificial intelligence can challenge but also fortify democratic institutions and practices.

All UVA may serve as lead PIs/researchers while postdocs are eligible as co-PIs.

Large Seed Grants: Projects with prospects to leverage findings to secure external funding for research or creative activities. Collaborative proposals are encouraged, especially those spanning departments/schools or career ranks or stages. Project duration is one year with an interim report due in six months and a final report at year’s end. Funding requests may be up to $40K per project.

– LOI deadline: January 23, 2026, 5pm
– Full proposal deadline: March 20, 2026, 5pm

Small Seed Grants: Projects requiring a smaller investment to initiate research and develop collaborations. Project duration is one year with an interim report due in six months and a final report at year’s end. Funding requests may be up to $15K per project.

– Proposal deadline: March 20, 2026, 5pm

NEW! AI & Democracy Grants: Projects that reveal the social, political, and cultural dynamics that emerge around the infrastructural integration of AI systems into institutions and people’s lives, as well as the role of governments, institutions, and organizations in the development and promotion of AI systems. Funding requests may be up to $50K per project with the possibility of applying for an additional $50K for a second year.

– Proposal deadline: March 20, 2026, 5pm

Funded Projects

AI Impact Atlas

This project develops a novel methodological approach to empower business leaders, policymakers, and their constituents with easy-to-use tools to understand the impact of AI on the workforce and to help them prepare for the future.

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Subterranean Convergence

Subterranean Convergence is a large-scale sculptural installation, performance, and digital archive commissioned by Clockshop and presented at Los Angeles State Historic Park.

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Open-Source AI as Democratic Infrastructure

This project develops the first integrated empirical framework for measuring participation, influence, and value capture across the open-source AI ecosystem.

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AI Shock

This project project examines how AI-driven labor displacement threatens to reshape American political geography and democratic representation.

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Automated Futures

This project investigates how AI is transforming democratic decision-making by influencing which futures are considered credible and worth governing.

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Cryptocurrency & Democracy

This project will examine the relationship between democratic institutes and cryptocurrency technologies and industries and will track cryptocurrency-related policy and market developments.

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Descendent-Led Digital Humanities Lab & Network

This project aims to identify and address the power asymmetries in resources and capacity that undermine descendant control over data used to construct historical narratives and land-use policies that support the survival of historic Black towns and settlements.

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Grant Recipients

2026-27 AI & Democracy Grant Recipient

Madhav Marathe

Affiliations

Executive Director, Biocomplexity Institute
Distinguished Professor of Biocomplexity
Professor of Computer Science

Bio

Madhav Marathe is an endowed distinguished professor of biocomplexity, executive director of the Biocomplexity Institute, and a tenured professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. Marathe is a passionate advocate and practitioner of transdisciplinary team science. During his thirty year professional career, he has established and led many large transdisciplinary projects and groups. His areas of expertise include digital twins, network science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, high-performance computing, computational epidemiology, biological and socially coupled systems, and data analytics.

His prior positions include professor of computer science and director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory within the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech and a team leader of research and computing in the Basic and Applied Simulation Science Group, Computer and Computational Sciences Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Association for Computing Machinery, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Marathe has published more than 500 articles in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops. Mentoring and training next-generation scientists has been his lifelong passion. He has mentored more than a dozen staff scientists, and (co)-advised more than thirty doctoral students, twenty MS students, and fifteen postdoctoral fellows.

Marathe and his team focus on developing the scientific foundations and the associated engineering principles to study large-scale biological, information, social, and technical (BIST) systems. His current interests span five broad themes: (i) methods to construct various BIST networks using partial and noisy data as well as procedural information; (ii) understanding the general form and structure of dynamical processes over BIST networks (e.g., key network/pathway properties and typical pathways that impact dynamics); (iii) algorithmic theory of optimization and control as it pertains to the dynamical processes, including methods to detect, enhance, arrest, and mitigate dynamics; (iv) general conceptual and algorithmic foundations to understand the co-evolution of the networks and dynamics; and (v) high-performance services-based computing solutions that can be delivered seamlessly to end users and policymakers.

2025-26 Seed Grant Recipient

Andrea Roberts

Affiliation

Associate Professor, Urban + Environmental Planning
Director, Center for Cultural Landscapes

Bio

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an advocate, educator, and scholar of Black placemaking histories and practices in the Americas, and a descendant of the founders of historic Black settlements in Texas. Her 12 years of professional experience in housing, government, and advocacy inform her scholarly efforts to bring marginalized, historic Black communities to the center of planning practice and research. She is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL) and is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Architectural History. She is also the owner of the consultancy, Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, through which she provides creative research design for civic art & landscape design projects, coaches emerging preservationists, and gives keynote lectures. Her peer-reviewed and public scholarship on Black placemaking and placekeeping frame these concepts as part of a long tradition of resistance and freedom-seeking in the Americas. She’s published in The Journal of Planning History, Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, Planning Theory & Practice, and Environmental Justice. She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association.

She created The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Grassroots Preservation Study in 2014 to identify and map disappearing settlements and their historic properties through participatory heritage conservation and community storytelling. The Project has become a vehicle through which students, advocates, and volunteers record locations and stories about 533 Black settlements in the state. Under the auspices of the CCL, she now leads the Mellon Foundation-supported Outsider Preservation Initiative, which will expand The Project beyond Texas to support projects in Louisiana, Virginia, California, and Canada. She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land: Place Persistence as Resistance, about her experiences recording place origin stories and grassroots Black preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience, which has been accepted for publication by The University of Texas Press.

Planners and researchers throughout the US have applied her approaches to challenge the invisibility of Black settlements and to promote recognition. She has received awards and fellowships for her engaged research methods and scholarship and serves on various boards and research teams. Dr. Roberts was Co-Project Director for the 2022 and 2024 NEH Summer Institutes for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black & Indigenous Histories.” Dr. Roberts serves on PolicyLink’s Spatial Futures Fellowship Advisory Committee and the Urban Landscape Studies Advisory Board at Dumbarton Oaks and is a steering committee member for the Black Experiences with Planning in Canada partnership and research study. Dr. Roberts is an advisory council member of the Oatlands National Trust for Historic Preservation Site. She supports the Aya Symposium, an annual Texas Freedom Colonies conference created for and by descendants.

Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in Government Administration and Public Finance from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College (1996).

Grant Program

About

Funded Projects

AI Impact Atlas

Subterranean Convergence

Open-Source AI as Democratic Infrastructure

AI Shock

Automated Futures

Cryptocurrency & Democracy

Descendent-Led Digital Humanities Lab & Network

Grant Recipients

Hannah Cyberey

Pedro Augusto Pereira Francisco

Alex Gates

Tom Hartvigsen

Steven L. Johnson

Kemi Jona

David Leblang

Madhav Marathe

Angel Adams Parham

LaRissa Rogers

Anil Vullikanti

Yingchong Wang

Andrea Roberts

Lana Swartz

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