CHEER Pilot Grant Funding
Pilot Grant Program
The CHEER Pilot Grant Program is designed to support early-stage research and build capacity for community and researcher partners to develop the skills, connections, and research agendas that position them to secure subsequent funding for ongoing collaboration focused on improving community health throughout Wisconsin.
In line with CHEER’s mission, projects are led by teams of researchers and community partners who are exploring health questions related to energy, transportation, land use, infrastructure, and extreme weather planning, policies, and choices to understand the potential near-term health benefits for at risk communities.
Pilot Grant Request for Applications
The current application period for CHEER Pilot Grants closed on March 6, 2026 and applications are currently under review.
For information about future Pilot Grant Cycles and other CHEER activities, please join our mailing list.
Current Funded Projects
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An Epidemiological Target Trial to Assess the Impact of Climate Change Action on Asthma Burden of Milwaukee Public School Children
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Health-Oriented Transportation: Safe routes to School in Wisconsin
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Human Health Effects of Cattle Sector Intensification
An Epidemiological Target Trial to Assess the Impact of Climate Change Action on Asthma Burden of Milwaukee Public School Children
In Milwaukee, 20% of children under 18 have an asthma diagnosis, compared with 6.5% of children nationally. This high medical vulnerability to air pollution also presents an opportunity to improve health for Milwaukee children with policies and actions that move to clean up the air. Dr. Amy Kalkbrenner, an Environmental Epidemiologist at UW–Milwaukee, is leading this project to explore the effects of different policy choices and energy scenarios on Asthma burden in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). In collaboration with MPS, Dr. Kalkbrenner’s team is analyzing school nurse visit and absence data for students in K5 – 5th grade across the city for the 2023-2024 school year to establish linkages between students’ exposure to known asthma irritating air pollutants including nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) at school and at home to develop the model to evaluate future scenarios.
With just two regulatory air quality monitors in Milwaukee, and a wide-range of exposures for individuals across the city, Dr. Tracey Holloway (Research Project Lead for CHEER’s Air Quality Modeling), Dr. Monica Harkey, and Dr. Steve Wangen (from the Data Science Core), have developed new tools to model daily NO2 levels across the city at high spatial resolution to support Dr. Kalkbrenner’s work. Their team will support modeling the changes in future scenarios as well.
Health-Oriented Transportation: Safe routes to School in Wisconsin
Dr. Samuel Younkin is partnered with Ben Varick and the Wisconsin Bike Federation to learn from high school students in Madison and Milwaukee about their opinions on the safety and popularity or barriers to active travel to school. The team is convening students to discuss these specific areas of safety concern, opportunities for improved infrastructure changes, and the long-term health benefits of active lifestyles that include routine cycling and walking.
With support from the Center’s Data Science Core, Harald Kliems in the UW–Madison Department of Pediatrics Prevention Research Center, and Dr. Xiao Qin from UW–Milwaukee’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation, the team is developing tools to analyze routes to school using publicly available Open Street Map data. Feedback and input from students about their experiences biking to school, along with third-party data rating the level of traffic stress, is being used to quantify the potential impacts of infrastructure changes proposed by the community. In collaboration with the Wisconsin Bike Federation the results and outcomes of this work will also be shared back with the schools and bike interest groups and the open-source analysis of routing data will be published to GitHub.
Human Health Effects of Cattle Sector Intensification
Dr. Holly Gibbs and Tara Mittelberg from UW–Madison’s Global Land Use and the Environment (GLUE) Lab are partnered with Amigos da Terra to explore the health impacts of cattle intensification practices in the Brazilian Amazon. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), also found across the state of Wisconsin, have been proposed as a solution to clearing forest for pasture, which is the largest driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Yet CAFOs have been shown to lead to increased air and water pollution.
This project aims to understand the health implications of these practices, and opportunities for reducing environmental harms in the process. The team is exploring how exposure to cattle feedlots affects human health outcomes, and how environmental factors such as forest cover, soil type, and soil condition mediate these effects. Environmental data from satellite imagery is used to map the evolution of cattle confinements through time using the 30cm satellite imagery available in Google Earth. These data are combined with public databases with municipal-year-level health data acquired from Brazil’s DataSUS database. This work provides a proof-of-concept for technology that could be applied to the U.S.