Kim Cronise (Psychology) 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 Is tolerance an enabling factor for greater alcohol consumption? This research in mice will involve at least nine undergraduate students. The results of these studies will improve our basic understanding of neural adaptations that occur in response to alcohol consumption and influence the development of alcoholism.
Andrea Lloyd (Biology) has received funding from the National Science Foundation’s Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity to investigate how the timing of summer precipitation affects boreal forests’ responses to climate warming. This project, funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will analyze interactions among climate, fire, and tree growth (specifically ring-width, ring density, and wood-isotope composition) in Alaska. The data will be used to improve an existing forest model, which will allow simulation of potential forest responses to future warming scenarios.
Sallie Sheldon (Biology) has received research funding from the Vermont Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, through a subaward from the University of Vermont, for a project titled Development of a Genetics Lab. As part of UVM’s Streams Project, which collects and shares data from streams in the Lake Champlain Watershed, this project seeks to trace sources of Escherichia coli in creeks and improve estimates of stream-treatment effects on algae. The data will be used by VT-EPSCoR’s Complex Systems Modeling Group.
Noah Graham (Physics) received a three-year research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through NSF's Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity. The grant includes support for three undergraduate summer students. It will provide continued support for research investigating coherent states of matter in the early universe and quantum-mechanical forces that arise in nanotechnology, to be carried out in collaboration with physicists at Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of Cologne. Title: Oscillons and Casimir Forces in Classical and Quantum Field Theory.
John Schmitt (Mathematics) has received a Research Opportunity Award from the National Science Foundation for collaborative research with a colleague at Carnegie Mellon University during his 2009-2010 leave and the academic year 2010-2011. The pair will examine a dual to the central problem in extremal combinatorics of Paul Turan. They will attempt to answer questions of the following type, "How large (or small) can an object be that lies in a particular discrete mathematical system and satisfies a certain condition?" John's project is titled Minimum Saturated Graphs and Hypergraphs.
William Pyle (Economics) has received a grant from the Center of International Studies at the University of Delaware for a project titled The Nature and Influence of Business Associations in Romania. This project augments Will’s previous research on business associations in Russia. The grant funding comes from a U.S. Dept. of State Title VIII program and covers the costs of administering surveys to 200 enterprises and 40 business associations in Romania.
Frank Winkler (Physics) has received funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Chandra X-Ray Observatory General Observer Program for a project that involves collaborators from the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University. The goal of this research is to study X-ray sources in an unusual galaxy (called NGC 4449) located "nearby" at only 12 million light years distance. Despite its small size, NGC 4449 plays has a great deal of star formation and destruction, and is the home of the brightest supernova remnant known in the universe.
Vermont EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) has awarded grants to three Middlebury faculty members for research during this summer and the academic year. Sallie Sheldon (Biology), with GIS Specialist Bill Hegman, will work with two students who have been awarded their own individual grants on a project titled Improving the Quality and Usability of VT-EPSCoR Streams Data for Teaching and Learning. They will develop multilayered GIS maps for the Streams Project, improve its database, and create a prototype for displaying and using the data online. The goal is to enhance the utility of the database for teaching about water-quality and land-use issues. Noah Graham (Physics) and one of his students will pursue a project titled Large-Scale Simulations of Oscillon Formation in the Early Universe, using computation to determine whether oscillons (solutions to nonlinear equations of motion that oscillate regularly in time) are formed in particle-physics models of the early universe. This study may shed light on the processes that formed the matter we see today. Tim Huang (Computer Science) will pursue his project titled Integrating Neural Networks and Stochastic Simulation in Computer Go during his 2009-2010 leave. His goal is to improve a computer program’s ability to identify promising lines of play in go, a strategy game, by using neural networks to influence the Monte Carlo simulation of many random games.
Sunhee Choi (Chemistry & Biochemistry) has received an NSF-RUI grant from the National Science Foundation, an award that funds research in undergraduate institutions. For this project, titled Oxidation of Purine Derivatives Coordinated to Pt(IV) and Ru(III) Complexes, Sunhee and six students will study the mechanisms by which platinum and ruthenium transition-metal complexes oxidize DNA. The findings will ultimately help design better anticancer drugs.
John Maluccio (Economics) has been awarded a fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Scholar program that will provide support for his 2009-2010 leave. He will spend four months examining the relationship between remittances and child nutrition in northern Guatemala and directing the follow-up portion of a World Bank study, Migration and Food and Nutrition Security in Guatemala. This project aims to measure the effects of migration on a wide variety of individual- and household-level outcomes, including poverty. He will be based in the northern town of Huehuetenango, at a satellite campus of the Universidad Rafael Landívar. His ultimate goal is to bring this experience back to Middlebury by offering an economic development course taught in Spanish.
Jacob Tropp (History) has received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to support his 2009-2010 academic leave. He will be working on a book project titled, Native American Administration and the Making of International Development Expertise, 1935-1960. Research for this project will take him to archives in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Washington, DC.
Don Wyatt (History) has been awarded a half-year visitorship in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ for 2009-2010. During his tenure he will begin work on a new project examining the early modern construction of Chinese racial identity. This book-length project is titled The Setting of a Race Apart, or How the Chinese Became Yellow.
Emily Proctor (Mathematics), along with colleagues from Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Rhodes, has received funding from the Mellon 23 Faculty Career Enhancement Program for a Collaborative Workshop that will focus on topics in Riemannian geometry that form the basis of their research programs. The workshop will be held in Middlebury during Fall 2009 and will bring together over 20 liberal arts college faculty members to brainstorm and catalyze scholarly collaborations and to share methods of introducing these topics to undergraduates.
Pavlos Sfyroeras (Classics) has been awarded a Howard Foundation fellowship for support of his 2009-2010 leave during which he plans to complete a book project titled: Aristophanes Sophos: Comedy and Philosophy in the Late Fifth Century. By arguing that Aristophanic comedy actively contributes to the intellectual debates of its time, this project invites historians of philosophy to expand their purview and broaden the definition of what counts as philosophy. In addition to revisiting Aristophanes' dialogue with the sophists, this book offers a reappraisal of the comic poet's influence on Plato.
Christopher Star (Classics) has been awarded a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University to support his 2009-2010 leave. He will be working on a book project titled, The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius, which will focus on the works of two of the Emperor Nero’s closest advisors and how the language of imperial command structured the concept of the self.
Sandra Carletti (Italian) has received a fellowship from the Marion & Jasper Whiting Foundation in support of a project titled, A Day in the Life of Italy. The grant provides funding for travel to Italy during her 2009-2010 leave. She plans to collect audio-visual materials that will enhance the teaching of Italian in the classroom and support the development of a textbook.
Patricia Saldarriaga (Spanish) has received a fellowship from the Marion & Jasper Whiting Foundation in support of a curriculum development project titled, Hispanic Religious Art of the Baroque. The grant provides funding for a trip to Mexico during her 2009-2010 leave during which she plans to visit museums, churches and Baroque architecture.
Emily Proctor (Mathematics) has been awarded an NSF Mentoring Travel Grant by the Association of Women in Math. This grant funds travel expenses for her to visit a senior colleague at The University of Notre Dame while she is on leave in Fall 2009.
Michael Sheridan (Sociology/Anthropology) has been selected to participate in the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad program this summer. The award covers all expenses for the four week seminar titled, Senegal: Gateway to West Africa. His goals are to get a more comparative perspective on African studies and to revise course syllabi to have more West African content. His independent project will be about forest management in southern Senegal.
Jacob Tropp (History) has been selected to participate in the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad program this summer. The award covers all expenses for the four week seminar titled, Senegal: Gateway to West Africa. He plans to develop a case study for a new global environmental history course that he’s creating and to study the transatlantic slave trade in that region with in order to enhance existing and develop future African history courses.
Jeremy Ward (Biology) has received a CAREER (Faculty Early Career Development) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support a five-year program of research with undergraduates and outreach to local public schools: Toward the genetics of Meiosis: Integration of Meiotic Molecular Biology and Public School Science Outreach. The CAREER program offers NSF's "most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars". This grant will involve more than 20 undergraduate students in research that combines genetics, cell biology, and molecular biology to determine the structure and function of a mouse gene that is important to the sexual reproduction process. The students will also be actively involved in developing a mobile genetics lab called the "Gene Wagon" that will be used in an outreach program for middle and high school teachers and their students.
Sallie Sheldon (Biology) and colleagues from the University of Connecticut have received a three-year research grant from the National Science Foundation for a project that will result in a thorough taxonomic revision of the widespread aquatic plant genus Najas, which includes both imperiled species and invasive species in the United States. At least six undergraduate students will be involved in this project, working in both field and lab in Connecticut and Vermont. The grant also provides funding for new equipment that will be used in this project as well as for academic year research and teaching.
Jeffrey Byers (Chemistry & Biochemistry) has received a fifth NSF-RUI grant from the National Science Foundation’s Research in Undergraduate Institutions activity. In this project, titled Radical Reactions of Transition Metal-Arene Complexes, Jeff and his students will be modifying the behavior of a wide variety of hydrocarbons by binding them to transition metals to see if they might be developed into more synthetically useful building blocks for more structurally complex substances. Recent discoveries in his lab indicate that this approach might be useful for a variety of applications ranging from conducting polymers to pharmaceutically relevant substances.
William Poulin-Deltour
(French) has received funding from the Spencer Foundation to support research during his 2009-2010 academic leave which he will spend in France carrying out ethnographic research for a project titled, "A ‘Double Bind’: Diversifying France’s Grandes ecoles." He will examine recent French efforts to foster socio-economic diversity in educational institutions traditionally reserved for a small and homogeneous elite. While the focus of this project is France, he hopes that his work can provide a backdrop to shed light on the taken-for-granted assumptions shared by various actors in other national contexts, particularly the United States, who shape public policies that attempt to diversify and democratize higher education.
Michael Katz (Russian) has been selected for a grant from the Fulbright Scholar Program to teach literature courses in Brazil during Spring 2010 at the Univerdidade Federal de Santa Catalina in Florianopolis, which is one of the sites for Middlebury's School in Latin America. He will offer a graduate seminar (in English) in the Program in English Literature, "The Realist Novel in the Old World and the New,” and he has also been invited to conduct a translation workshop for faculty members of English and other languages. He has spent considerable time in many Slavic-speaking countries, and he has decided to try something different next year: he is now busy studying Portuguese.
Robert Schine (Religion and Classics) has been selected to participate in the Schusterman Center’s Summer Institute for Israel Studies at Brandeis University this coming summer. This is an all expenses-paid, three week long intensive interdisciplinary workshop; the first half of the workshop is on the Brandeis campus while the second half is held in Israel. As part of the workshop, he will be developing a new syllabus for his seminar on Zionist ideology.
Michael Sheridan (Sociology/Anthropology) has received funding through the Wenner-Gren Foundations in Stockholm, Sweden in support of his 2008-2009 academic leave. As a visiting professor at Lund University in Sweden during Spring 2009, he will give a series of lectures and work on a research project titled Ethnographic Perspectives on Ecology, Power and Scale. The overall goal of this project is to use an African case study to show how the concepts of “cultural scale” and “social power” can contribute to understanding landscape change from a political ecology perspective.
Frank Winkler (Physics) has received funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's General Observer Program for a project titled Grain Destruction in Puppis A, that involves collaborators from the Space Telescope Science Institute, North Carolina State, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. With observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope they plan to use the supernova remnant Puppis A as an interstellar laboratory for studying the effects on dust grains in interstellar space.
Sallie Sheldon (Biology) has received funding from the National Science Foundation to support student involvement in a collaborative project with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. Students each summer will participate in an interdisciplinary research project at Plum Island Sound which will contribute to a better understanding of how salt marsh ecosystems function and their role in coastal landscapes.
Peter Ryan (Geology) has received funding from the Lintilhac Foundation to initiate a long-term groundwater monitoring project in the Stowe-Waterbury area of Vermont. The project is a collaboration that also involves the Vermont Geological Survey and will provide data that will be used by Middlebury College geology students doing independent research. Anne Knowles (Geography) has received a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled Holocaust Historical GIS that will involve ground-breaking application of GIScience models and methods to carry out four case studies that examine geographic aspects of the Holocaust from the continental to the local scale. This collaborative research effort includes colleagues from Texas State University-San Marcos and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which is providing much of the data for the project, as well as from six universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Middlebury undergraduates will be working with Knowles to develop an historical GIS of the concentration camp system.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a Major Research Instrumentation grant to Middlebury College for acquisition of a spectropolarimeter that will be mated to an existing magnet/cryostat and make it possible for studies using the college’s magnetic circular dichroism (MDC) and circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy instrument to continue. Under the direction of James Larrabee, this grant will support research efforts of three faculty members in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and will provide research-training opportunities for students during the summer and academic year.
Matthew Dickerson (Computer Science) has received a Research Opportunity Award from the National Science Foundation for collaborative research with a colleague at the University of California-Irvine. The research will apply geometric algorithmic techniques and data structures to the problem of data mining in GIS applications. Title: Privacy Management, Measurement, and Visualization in Distributed Environments.
Marcia Collaer (Psychology and Neuroscience) and a colleague from St. Michael’s College have been awarded funding from the NASA-funded Vermont Space Grant Consortium for research that investigates the factors that influence ability to navigate in and learn environments, using virtual reality simulations. At least one Middlebury student will be involved in this research project.