Two faculty members at UMass Dartmouth have each been awarded $25,000 to aid their efforts in ocean data collection and ovarian cancer detection, the university system president’s office announced May 25.

The money is part of $250,000 in seed funding the UMass system appropriated across its five campuses. The fund is overseen by the Office of Technology Commercialization and Ventures at the UMass President’s Office in Boston.

“As a public research university, UMass has a duty to drive innovation that strengthens the socio-economic fabric of our communities, nation, and world,” UMass President Marty Meehan said. “With these grants, we’re investing in world class faculty who are carrying out our mission through their cutting-edge discoveries, attracting the highest quality collaborators, and bringing the results of research to the marketplace.”

At UMass Dartmouth, the grants were awarded to Amit Tandon of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Milana Vasudev of the Department of Bioengineering.

Tandon will use funding to develop inexpensive devices to detect subsurface ocean data. One such project in production is an “Aurelia,” which features a low-cost depth control system to allow several dive/surface trips, an Android graphical interface for mission planning over Bluetooth, a mobile radio antenna for retrieval, and a smart charging system for quick re-deployment

Vasudev, meanwhile, is having her team develop a novel screening technique that can detect ovarian cancer. This would be achieved through the use of photonic crystal surface enhanced Raman spectroscopyexosomes to find exomes— a type of pouch typically filled with lipid or protein that is released when cells fuse.