In March 2014, Kara Cooney was awarded a Transdisciplinary Seed Grant offered by the University of California, Los Angeles. This grant is intended to support research that would effectively employ graduate students and utilize resources from different disciplines within the university, bridging the sciences with humanities to explore a different approach to archaeological research.

Working separately from her Transdisciplinary Seed Grant-funded project, Cooney proposed a research expedition to Egypt in the Spring of 2015. Upon being awarded the Antiquities Endowment Fund grant from the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), Cooney and her team of researchers that includes Dutch conservator Elsbeth Geldhof, who has been working on the Vatican (Egyptian) Coffin Project, have been planning to analyze and photo-document 21st Dynasty coffins in the royal cache, currently housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This project will provide an unprecedented stepping stone for creating a comprehensive coffin database for the institution.