Liquid crystals, how to teach science to children and the spread of a particular type of tree: Today, I'm spotlighting some projects researchers are taking on at Kent State University, thanks to recent grants.

Check back later this week for a look at some grants received by schools including Case Western Reserve University and the University of Akron, and the work being funded by those grants.

Researchers at Kent State have recently received four grants from the National Science Foundation to fund four different projects.

First up, the co-directors of the Science of Learning and Education Center at Kent State have received a three-year, $1.3 million grant to support a project designed to address hunger and to get children interested in science.

Bradley Morris, associate professor of educational psychology in the College of Education, Health and Human Services, and John Dunlosky, professor of psychological sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, will be working with the Cincinnati Museum Center and Cincinnati-area soup kitchen La Soupe on the project, a news release said. At the museum, families will be able to watch a trained cook prepare a dish and then take home a tote bag with recipes and guides. The soup kitchen will work the model into its existing programs.

"One of the big barriers to science is that people think, 'I don't know a lot about science, so how am I going to teach my kids about it?' " Dunlosky said in the release. "Food is a good context because people eat or prepare food all the time, and it's not necessarily something that has a lot of bad connotations with science."

Next, Kent State researchers will be leading a collaborative effort to study the spread of the Eastern Red Cedar tree species.

"The Eastern Red Cedar has negative impacts on species diversity of co-occurring native plants and soil-nutrient availability," David Ward, a professor in the department of biological sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, said in a news release. "It is an important topic to address because these trees are taking valuable rangeland away from grazers such as cattle and sheep that only eat grasses."

Ward will be leading the project along with Oscar Rocha and Juliana Medeiros in the department of biological sciences. Sarah Supp, assistant professor of data analytics at Denison University, and Gil Bohrer, associate professor of environmental engineering at Ohio State University, will also work on the project, which has received a three-year, $914,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The grant will support stipends for undergraduate and graduate students, including some video-production undergraduates who will be working with associate professor emeritus David Smeltzer in the university's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Those students will work with researchers to create a documentary on the spread of the Eastern Red Cedars for PBS, the release stated.

Finally, Trustees Research Professor Oleg Lavrentovich was the recipient of two of the recent grants, a news release stated. The chemical physicist in Kent State's Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute received almost $1 million between two National Science Foundation grants. One is a three-year, $540,000 grant to study "active colloids with tunable interactions in liquid crystals," the release stated, which builds on a 2016 project that demonstrated how bacteria in a liquid crystal environment can be directed to move in a fixed pattern.

Lavrentovich also received a three-year, $450,000 grant to study "electrically tunable cholesteric optical filters," which the release describes as relating to how electricity can be used to change the color of a liquid crystal film.