MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Courtesy of the president’s office, here’s a look at recent accomplishments and publications by Middlebury’s faculty, and in some cases their students.
Andrea Lloyd (Biology) and colleagues involved in the Bonanza Creek Long Term Ecological Research site in Alaska have received funding from the National Science Foundation for a project titled The Dynamics of Change in Alaska’s Boreal Forests: Resilience and Vulnerability in Response to Climate Warning. The project is part of the NSF-LTER program, which provides ongoing support of basic scientific research and monitoring in key ecosystems around the U.S. The grant will enable Andi and one undergraduate student to conduct research each summer in interior Alaska, in an effort to understand how climate change may affect forest fire frequency and the distribution of tree species in the boreal forest.
Jason Mittell (American Studies/Film & Media Culture) has had an article published, “Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption and Rethinking Textuality,” in Particip@tions Volume 4, Issue 1 (May 2007). The article was co-authored by Jonathan Gray.
Rich Wolfson (Physics) published a paper, “Maximum Energies of Force-Free Coronal Flux Ropes,” in the May 10, 2007 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Coauthors are Jon Larson (’06) and Roberto Lionello of Science Applications International in San Diego.
Kirsten Wandschneider (Economics/IPE) and Jeff Cason (Political Science) published an article with Amichai Kilchevsky (’06), entitled “Peace and Economic Interdependence in the Middle East,” in The World Economy, Vol. 30, No. 4, April 2007.
Barbara Hofer (Psychology) has been awarded a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation through NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences division, as a Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity. The grant provides support for Barbara’s 2007-2008 academic leave and more than a dozen students will participate in this research project, titled Knowing Who and What to Believe: Epistemic Development during Adolescence. This multi-method study will explore how adolescents progress in their ability to assess and evaluate sources of information and competing knowledge claims, how they justify what they know, and the use they make of evidence, skills that are critical to creating a citizenry with the competence to engage critical scientific issues.
Jeffrey Carpenter (Economics) has had two articles published recently: “Punishing Free-Riders: how group size affects mutual monitoring and the provision of public goods,” in Games and Economic Behavior, 60(1), 31-51; and “Fairness and Freight-Handlers: Local Labor Market Conditions and Wage-Fairness Perceptions in a Trucking Firm,” in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 60(4), 477-498, with Eric Verhoogen and Stephen Burks, 2007.
Anne Knowles (Geography) and colleagues from the University of Bristol and Texas State University received funding from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for a workshop that was held at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in August. The goal of the workshop was to develop a long-term interdisciplinary research agenda for developing understanding of the geographies of the Holocaust and how they can be studied with geographical methods, notably GIS. The funding covered travel, lodging, and honoraria for a dozen scholars in history and geography from the United States and Europe to participate in a two-week program of presentations and archival workshops.
Sunhee Choi (Chemistry & Biochemistry) received supplemental funding from the National Science Foundation to support expenses related to a collaboration with Gulnar Rawji, a professor at Southwestern University in Texas. NSF’s Research Opportunity Award supplement program is designed to enable faculty from predominantly undergraduate institutions to gain research experience with an NSF-funded colleague elsewhere. While mentors for ROA projects are usually at research universities, in this case Sunhee served as mentor for Dr. Rawji’s project, and one of Dr. Rawji’s students joined Sunhee’s research group this past summer.
Phani Wunnava (Economics) co-authored a paper with Kirsten Wandschneider (Economics/IPE) and Khurram Jamali (‘04) that has appeared in Applied Economics, 2007, 39: 1425-1432. It is entitled, “The effect of political regimes and technology on economic growth.”
Molly Costanza-Robinson (Environmental Studies and Chemistry & Biochemistry) has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation Geosciences Directorate for a three-year research project titled Measurement and Microtomographic Imaging of the Air-Water Interface in Unsaturated Porous Media, and a two-year grant from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society for related work. Three undergraduate students will assist with this research each year. The project will use cutting-edge 3-D imaging techniques and complementary “wet lab” methods to elucidate micro-scale water distributions in soil systems. This knowledge will further our understanding of the subsurface fate and transport of environmental contaminants, including chemicals and microbes, and will improve environmental remediation efforts.
Helen Young (Biology) has co-written an article with two alumni, Dan Dunning and Kyle von Hasseln, which has appeared in American Journal of Botany, 94(7):1267-1271. It is entitled, “Foraging behavior affects pollen removal and deposition in Impatiens capensis (Balsaminaceae).”
Richard Bunt (Chemistry & Biochemistry) has been awarded a grant from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society for a three-year research project titled, Hammett Studies of P, N-Chiral Ligands. Rick also received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for this project. This grant provides funding for students, travel to conferences, and support for his 2007-2008 leave. At least six students will be involved in this project which seeks to understand how metal-based catalysts, such as palladium, control the three-dimensional orientation of new chemical bond forming reactions. Understanding the 3-D orientation of molecules is important in biological systems and drug design for new pharmaceuticals.
Laura Lieber (Classics and Religion) has received a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for a project titled, “The Liturgical Poetry of Yannai on Genesis,” which she will be working on during her 2007-2008 academic leave. In this project, she will contextualize the poet Yannai (Galilee, 5th/6th century) in the world of the early synagogue, looking at his importance in terms of Jewish-Byzantine language, literature, art, culture, and society. The final monograph will consist of a series of analytical essays complemented by annotated translations of thirty poems.
Elizabeth Morrison (Religion) has received a Junior Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation in support of her 2007-2008 academic leave during which she will work on a project titled, Religious authority family-style: The master-disciple pattern in Chinese Buddhism. The grant includes funding for a four month research stint at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
Pat Manley and Tom Manley (both Geology) have received funding from the U.S. Geological Survey to continue studies of climate change by collecting and analyzing data from Lake Champlain. This grant funds a site survey for locating a drilling site in Lake Champlain. During February 2008, the GLAD 800 Global Lake Drilling system will obtain cores that will be analyzed for climate changes within the NE for the last 14,000 years.
Frank Winkler (Physics) has received a grant from NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute for research related to observations made using the Hubble Space Telescope. This project involves collaboration with a colleague from Dartmouth and a number of other astronomers. They are observing the remnant of a “young” supernova — a star that exploded in the southern sky some 3,000 years ago. Its age has just been determined by Karl Twelker (’07) in his senior thesis this past year.
Amy Briggs and Daniel Scharstein (both Computer Science) have been awarded a three-year grant through the National Science Foundation’s Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity. Their project, titled Visual Navigation from Circular Feature Sequences, will develop new methods in robotics and computer vision to help enable mobile robots to navigate indoor environments using visual input. The grant will provide research opportunities for at least nine undergraduate students.
Catherine Combelles (Biology) has been awarded a three-year research grant from the National Institutes of Health through the AREA program (Academic Research Enhancement Award) for a project titled, Oxidative Stress and Oocyte Development. This research will involve at least nine undergraduate students. The results of these studies will improve our basic understanding of factors that may influence the quality of female gametes or oocytes, thereby providing critical foundations for the improvement of female reproductive health.
Rebecca Gould (Religion) has been awarded a Contemplative Practice Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The grant provides funding for developing a new religion course entitled: “Practicing for Life: Contemplative Practice and Social Change.”
Jeff Munroe (Geology) has received funding from the Ashley National Forest (USDA Forest Service) to support data preparation for a glacial geologic map of the Uinta Mountains in Utah. This project is an extension of a field mapping campaign undertaken by Jeff and a colleague in 2006. The work will be done at Middlebury this fall by Lee Corbett, a geology major who graduated in 2007.
Leger Grindon (Film & Media Culture) published a book chapter titled, “1986: Movies and the Fissures in Reagan’s America,” in American Cinema of the 1980s, edited by Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Michael Kraus (Political Science) has had two articles published. The first is entitled, “Letter from Prague: A Tale of Two Václavs.” It appears in European Affairs, nos. 2-3, Summer/Fall 2007. The second essay, “Did the Charter 77 Movement Bring an End to Communism?” appears in New England Review, Volume 28, Number 2 (2007).
Giovanni Spani (Italian) has been promoted to the rank of Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian.
Usama Soltan (Arabic and International Studies) has been promoted to the rank of Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and International Studies.