Fall 2025 Micro Grant Recipients
Luis Castaneda, Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies, received a grant to create video lectures and essays for teaching and scholarship with three main goals. The first is to develop a series of high-quality video lectures that accompany courses on Latin American literature and culture, both in Middlebury classrooms and in open-access online formats. The grant will also help create short, research-based video essays that communicate advanced critical perspectives on Latin American fiction to a broader public. Finally, this will serve as an opportunity for professional growth, deepening my technical skills in video production—specifically camera operation, lighting, framing, and editing—while exploring the integration of these methods into academic practice.
Kirsten Coe, Associate Professor of Biology, received a grant to build 18 specialized surface moisture sensors to study desert biocrust communities. Traditional sensors often miss the small rainfall and dew events that activate these surface-dwelling organisms because their probes are buried too deep in the soil. By deploying these new sensors in central New Mexico for one year starting this January, the team aims to collect novel data on how subtle moisture pulses drive productivity in water-limited ecosystems.
Bert Crosby, Lighting Designer and Technical Director, Dance, received a grant to find out more about technology research for the dance department and to compare efficiency vs output vs noise levels (and cost) on theatre equipment by attending a Live Design International (LDI) conference. Bert hopes to gain training, exposure to the most current entertainment equipment, data and specifications on current lighting, projector and sound equipment on the market
Sebnem Gumuscu, Associate Professor of Political Science, received a grant as a supplement to a pilot study conducted with colleague Natalie Chwalisz, Academic Affairs), to unpack Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s support among Turkish migrant communities. They will run an online survey coupled with niche sampling to target the Turkish migrant population in Germany.
Suzanne Gurland, Sidney B. and Irene F. Luria, Professor of Psychology, received a grant to improve students’ learning experience in her Psychological Statistics course by purchasing an electronic tablet that will enable her to integrate hand-drawn visual aids with text-based displays, both during class and in saved documents for students’ later reference.
Michaela Kubacki, Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics, received a grant to participate in the workshop, Teaching Computation with MATLAB (and GenAI), organized by MathWorks and the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College. The workshop brought together educators teaching computation in STEM courses using MATLAB software for the purpose of sharing and learning about new trends and tools in computational pedagogy. Presentations and break-out discussions provided participants with numerous opportunities to productively explore the possibilities and challenges of GenAI as it relates to teaching computational skills and thinking. As a participant in this workshop, she developed a teaching activity that was peer reviewed and published in their Teaching Activities Archive.
Barbara McCall, Associate Vice President of Student Health & Wellbeing, received a grant to better understand the student health data the Center for Health and Wellness is collecting to drive data-informed decisions about their service lines, programs, and to understand their impact(s). This funding allows the Center to use existing staff and technological resources to improve student health outcomes and ensure they are focused on the most pressing student health needs for our campus community.
Katie Moon, Research & Data Analyst - Assessment and Institutional Research, received a grant to gain more in-depth Tableau skills and obtain the ability to display data in different forms using the tool. The Assessment and Institutional Research team uses Tableau on a regular basis to communicate survey results and data about the student population to a wide variety of stakeholders. Being able to take an instructor-led course will also contribute to her professional development. She will eventually become a Tableau Certified Data Analyst, a career goal of hers!
Phil Murphy, Professor of International Policy and Development, received a grant to take a short, on-demand asynchronous course in hypernetwork analysis and problem structuring. The concept of hypernetworks/hypergraphs appears to hold a greater potential for application to the study of complex systems than traditional network techniques. The short course and the text copy of Jeffrey Johnson’s Hypernetworks in the Science of Complex Systems will help to develop the technique for a book project he is currently pursuing.
Germán Reyes, Assistant Professor of Economics, received a grant to investigate whether college students are “outsourcing” critical thinking to generative AI tools. Using a novel survey, the project measures how AI changes the time and cognitive effort students allocate to academic tasks, and how they reallocate time saved by AI, findings with implications for human capital formation.
Erin Wolcott, Associate Professor of Economics, received a grant to work with her former thesis student, Alexa Lane ‘23.5 to find out if Syringe Services Programs (SSPs) increase drug-related deaths. They will use the latest event study techniques to estimate the causal impact of SSPs on drug-related deaths. This is an important policy question, where getting the right answer has real-world consequences for addressing the opioid epidemic.