Funded through the Andrew Mellon Foundation as part of its Sawyer Seminars series, Creative Placemaking, Black Restorative Ecologies and Black Spacial Futures will include reading group meetings, public-facing roundtables, film screenings and local site visits.

“Our seminar will explore the possibilities of place for a future of Black existence,” said Morrison. “We will look at the social and natural terrains that Black folks navigate on a day-to-day basis and how we might account for those and invest in place-based Black futures.”

Defining Black Ecologies 

Black ecologies is a budding, interdisciplinary field that focuses on the relationship between people and their environments. Researchers typically include natural environments, built environments and social environments in their analyses. For Morrison, studying Black ecologies is necessary for a more sustainable future. 

“For me, the restorative is embedded in the study of Black ecologies,” said Morrison. “When putting together this proposal, I wanted to think about restoration holistically, looking at Black epistemologies and ways of being that are already restorative.” 

Black farmers who are equally mindful of their environment and community are one example Morrison cites. The cultural and practical knowledge of people currently enacting restorative practices will inform the group’s inquiry.  

“We don’t necessarily always have to recreate the wheel,” says Morrison. “There are lessons in our past and present that can help us think about the where of Black futures in addition to the how.”

Building an Interdisciplinary Team 

Interested in building a team with diverse experiences and complementary skill sets, Morrison connected with two other academics who call the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences home – and . 

Nbuduizu, an assistant professor in the , researches the influence of race, class and gender on housing policy. Robinson, a sociologist who teaches in the same department, has published books on Black urbanism in America and Black identities and communities in the South.  

“Our team of investigators centers the specificities of place in Black ways of knowing, being, building and strategizing in the US,” said Morrison. “I wanted to build from that investment in place-based epistemologies to ground the Sawyer Seminar’s work.”

In addition to the three investigators, the grant supports two dissertation fellows and a postdoctoral fellow. The team selected Raychel Gadson and Dominique Hazzard, both doctoral candidates at Johns Hopkins University, as dissertation fellows. Timothy Kumfer, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and has conducted extensive research and programming within the DMV area, is the team’s postdoctoral fellow. The group’s extensive expertise in and ties to the immediate community will enhance its work, says Morrison. 

A Year of Programming 

Named for the Mellon Foundation’s longest-serving president, the Sawyer Seminars have provided unique, exploratory spaces for cutting-edge research since 1994. 

Georgetown has played host to two prior Sawyer Seminars. The first, led by and , critically examined the invention and development of the concept of the Silk Road. It was also the first Sawyer Seminar in the greater Washington, DC area. In 2016, Dana Luciano, and began a seminar that examined the ways humans interact with and change their environments. 

“In line with Mellon’s mission, we want this seminar to be about actively thinking and planning, bringing folks together to not only think about new ideas, but using those ideas to generate new lines of inquiry and practices,” said Morrison. “I’d like some of our public conversations to be recorded, so there’s an archive of our work. We’ll be encouraging wider participation in our events.” 

The seminar’s programming will seek to engage a wider community, including both students and faculty on-campus and interested parties in the wider metropolitan area.  

The first two events will feature conversations on pressing topics. Weathering the Weather: Building Climate-Resilient Black Futures will be held on October 18 and Insurgent Black Ecologies will be held on November 8. More details can be found on the group’s , and . 

Related News

, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the , is bringing attention to a crucial part of Black history: the significance of the kitchenette apartment building in mid-twentieth century Chicago. In addition to writing a first-of-its-kind book about kitchenettes during this time period, Morrison has started a digital humanities project with Georgetown students.

Read More About Dr. Amani Morrison’s Research

Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change is a series of lectures, art installations, and group discussions that critically examine the ways humans interact with and change their environments. It is funded through the  as part of the , which support comparative research on history and contemporary culture.

Approaching the Anthropocene, Humanists Tackle Environmental Issues

The project brings together Coptic researchers from around the globe in an interdisciplinary, collaborative effort to further the study of the ancient language. The breadth of the project is supported by the diverse fields of its directors: Zeldes specializes in computational linguistics while Schroeder is an expert in the history of religion, with a focus on Christianity in late antiquity.

“It is 2023 and we all expect any major cultural heritage text to be available online, with study tools and online dictionaries – but for Coptic, we still have a lot of work to do to get there,” said Zeldes, an associate professor in the . “This grant will help us to realize that goal.”

Coptic Collaborators 

This grant is the sixth from the NEH that Zeldes and Schroeder have received to advance their goal of digitizing, translating and disseminating Coptic texts. Coptic, the first alphabetized language of ancient Egypt, is a direct successor to the language of the hieroglyphs, and is a heritage language for Copts, a Christian minority in Egypt and the diaspora. It is both a crucial language for studying some of the earliest texts of Christianity, and an unparalleled source of information for historical and contact linguistics. Together with Ancient Egyptian, it forms part of the longest continually attested language branch on Earth. Despite this, Coptic has long languished in academia as a lesser-studied ancient language, receiving scant attention in comparison to university standbys Greek and Latin. 

Thanks to the Coptic Scriptorium, a vast wealth of ancient Coptic is now available to anyone with an internet connection. Due to the collaborative nature of the project, users can not only access texts, but also sign-up to add annotations, analyses and translations. Perhaps most useful for Coptic researchers is the ability to quickly and effectively search for keywords and patterns in the treasure trove of texts, a previously unthinkable task. 

“Coptic is very challenging for the digital humanities because word forms fuse together, spelling varies and searching for anything requires doing analyses that are hard even for state-of-the-art tools,” said Zeldes.

The award is part of some $35.63 million granted by the NEH this year in support of humanities projects. 

“These 258 newly funded projects demonstrate the vitality of the humanities across our nation,” said NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, in a press release. “NEH is proud to support exemplary education, preservation, media, research and infrastructure projects that expand resources for Americans, support humanities programs and opportunities for underserved students and communities and deepen our understanding of our history, culture and society.”

Related News

Linguistics Team Wins Competition, Professor Receives Accolades

Zeldes’ Team Awarded NEH Grant for Coptic Linguistics Project

A New Life for Ancient Texts

The “Creating an Arts and Humanities Hub at Georgetown University” project will renovate McNeir Auditorium and the adjacent Davis Center Lobby to serve as a focal point on campus for arts and humanities activities and programming offered by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative.

The grant, part of $33.17 million allocated to humanities projects across the country by the NEH, will supercharge the Humanities Initiative as it facilitates interdisciplinary partnerships on campus. 

“The work of the humanities is very comprehensive, very holistic. We examine complex problems, we transcend sectorial knowledge, we connect disparate disciplines,” explains Pireddu. “The trick is to make this work accessible to a wider audience and to explore how complex problems can be tackled better with people from a variety of backgrounds.”

Centering the Humanities in Uncertain Times

The Georgetown Humanities Initiative, officially launched in January 2020, serves as a catalyst for research, pedagogical innovations, and public facing activities in the humanities on the Georgetown campus. Unbeknownst to faculty, stakeholders and students at the time was just how essential the humanities would become in surviving the coronavirus pandemic. Around the world, these disciplines enabled isolated individuals to cope with unprecedented challenges. 

“People turned to the humanities, to stories and art that could give sense and perspective to this incredibly difficult, tragic situation,” reflects Pireddu. “Consolation and solace were found in the arts.” 

The Humanities Initiative provides programming to confront difficult questions at the center of education. This spring, the initiative hosted a conversation with renowned experts and practitioners in the fields of physics, psychology and art to tackle the uncertainty inherent in human existence. 

The planned renovations of McNeir and Davis Lobby will address the substantive functionality of both spaces and, as a result, expand on their present utilization, creating an Arts and Humanities Hub as the first step toward the long-term vision of a full-fledged Humanities Center that is part of Georgetown’s comprehensive capital campaign.

“NEH is proud to support these exemplary education, media, preservation, research and infrastructure projects,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) in a press release. “These 245 projects will expand the horizons of our knowledge of culture and history, lift up humanities organizations working to preserve and tell the stories of local and global communities, and bring high-quality public programs and educational resources directly to the American public.”

The fully refurbished and re-equipped McNeir Auditorium and Davis Center Lobby will serve as spaces where multidisciplinary arts and humanities activities can flourish. In these spaces, Georgetown will significantly expand the range of program offerings and will be able to reach new audiences by adopting different modalities to convey content (e.g., streaming and archiving events with the introduction of appropriate A/V equipment) while strengthening interdepartmental partnerships and forging new relationships.  

“When we’re facing complex problems, the ability to rationalize and empathize and imagine are essential,” says Pireddu. “There has been a crisis of imagination in the past few years – reality became stranger than fiction. While fiction is a construction, it can tell the deepest truths about humanity as a whole. In my view, precisely now is when the humanities need to be put at the center of our education. They give us the skills to interpret, to understand, to contextualize and to survive.”

This grant from the  will pilot innovative, replicable workshops on artificial intelligence (AI) and ethics for three nationally recognized fellowship programs. Little and Matheny’s goal is to provide training and learning opportunities for those seeking government careers in technology and AI policy in order to instill an educated and actionable commitment to its responsible use.

PARTNERING ACROSS INSTITUTIONS

Little and Matheny received one of 27 grants awarded as part of PIT-UN’s inaugural “Network Challenge,” which aims to support the development of new public interest technology initiatives and institutions in academia, and foster collaboration among the network’s 21 partner institutions, including Georgetown. The network also seeks to grow a new generation of civic-minded technologists and digitally fluent policy leaders.

EDUCATING ACROSS FIELDS

Public interest technology is a broadly defined and emerging area of study that combines digital innovation and public policy.

As technological advancements in AI rapidly continue, Little’s partnership with Matheny will assist in educating those individuals working with or around AI to ensure their enactment of socially conscientious technology or technology policy.

Georgetown joins other universities across the United States who have created joint degrees, exchange programs and cross-disciplinary initiatives to begin developing a robust pipeline of future technologists and leaders seeking to pursue careers in the growing field.

The workshops developed by Little and Matheny comprise a 35-person cohort.

Its members are drawn from programs with similar apprenticeship structures that provide early or mid-career technologists and technology policy leaders postings within federal government agencies, Congressional offices and congressional committees.

These entities oversee decisions on the deployment and governance of technology, including AI, and are a foundational part of their development.

By drawing on the Ethics Lab’s novel methods for engaging challenging and ethical questions, future policy leaders will be well equipped to develop ethical technological legislation.

The (SMART) will focus on fundamental research on novel materials and devices with the potential to significantly advance the field of nanoelectronic computing. Total funding for the SMART center is $10.3 million over 4 years, including a $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), and $2.8 million from SMART partners.

Liu, an incoming McDevitt Chair in the Department of Physics, will work alongside colleagues from the University of Minnesota, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Maryland.

A NEW PARADIGM

SMART will conduct research on spintronics, a field of physics that focuses on the “spin” of electrons that leads to magnetism. This is a different property than the charge of electrons, the subject of traditional electronics.

Spintronics hold the potential for new technology and computational systems that are faster, more reliable, and use less energy than traditional electronics.

“The energy consumption in today’s electronics has become a critical challenge, leading to the coming end of that has been the icon of the high-tech industry over the past 5 decades,” Liu said. “Spintronics offers an exciting new paradigm for future nanoelectronics using electron spin as the information carrier, with vast potentials to fundamentally transform its energy landscape.”

According to the SMART team proposal, the center will be “driven by the need for innovative memory and processing architectures that promise to significantly improve the energy efficiency, throughput, and overall functionality of tomorrow’s computing paradigms; in particular, neuromorphic computing, probabilistic computing, in-memory computing, and wave-based information processing.”

Liu will lead a team on magneto-ionic materials, one of three themes in the SMART Center’s research portfolio. He will examine how properties of materials may be manipulated by the application of an electric field through controlled motion of ions.

“This is an exciting approach that could be a potential ‘game-changer,’” Liu said. “The all-important interfaces in these materials — and, consequently, their material properties — may be drastically changed with a voltage bias, without the flow of relatively inefficient, conventional electric current.”

The SMART center will also offer excellent opportunities for the training of graduate students, undergraduate students, and postdoctoral researchers.

ON-CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY

Though Minnesota will be home to the SMART Center’s headquarters, Georgetown has been preparing to conduct cutting-edge spintronics and nanomagnetics research as well.

The NSF has recently awarded Georgetown a  for a state-of-the-art magnetic characterization instrument known as the Magnetic Property Measurement System (MPMS3).

An interdisciplinary team of faculty — including physics professors Kai Liu, and and chemistry professors , , and  — will use MPMS3, which is scheduled to be installed and commissioned in Liu’s lab in early 2019. MPMS3 enables a broad range of ground-breaking research projects. It will also be a timely addition to conduct SMART research.

This shared facility will also help to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields and provide research experience for undergraduate students through several partner REU programs.

“In addition to the fantastic opportunities created for our students, Prof. Liu’s program benefits all of the materials research on campus, both by contributing to our shared resources and by raising our profile in the scientific community,” said.

Liu also organized an last month for NSF’s Division of Materials Research. The workshop focused on challenges and opportunities in the post-Moore’s Law era.

“This workshop brought together leading experts in the field to highlight scientific opportunities that may address the energy challenges in nanoelectronics in general, as symbolized by the coming end of Moore’s law,” Liu said. “We are very pleased to be able to host this important meeting at Georgetown, with strong support from the Department of Physics, Georgetown ������̳, and campus as a whole.”

of the has received a grant of more than $320,000 from the to expand the study of Coptic texts using computational linguistics over the next three years.

The grant is the fifth in a series awarded to Zeldes and co-investigator for their work on the , a web-based database and analysis tool for ancient Coptic texts.

A TEACHER-DRIVEN PATH

Zeldes began studying Coptic, the first alphabetized language to arise in ancient Egypt, while in college at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He came across it in much the same way that many students today come across new disciplines.

“I asked other students which elective to take, and they said ‘The one with the best teacher,’” Zeldes said. “I ended up studying Coptic and Ancient Egyptian for the following two years and loved every minute of it.”

He returned to the ancient language years later, when a chance meeting with Schroeder at an NEH-sponsored summer institute program spurred a new collaborative project.

“We realized pretty quickly we could team up and try to bring Coptic online closer to the level that Greek and Latin already enjoy thanks to projects such as the ,” Zeldes said. “The result is our site, .”

BRINGING COPTIC ONLINE

Coptic Scriptorium is a web-based project allowing users to access, translate, analyze, and annotate ancient Coptic texts. Its ability to conduct morphological and syntactic analysis is particularly crucial, as Coptic’s complex word formation and fusion processes make search and analysis challenging.

“It’s been used to study the language and style of early monastic leaders in 4th-5th century Egypt, compare versions of the Bible, do network analysis on names of people and places mentioned in the same texts, study the distribution of Greek loanwords in different Coptic genres, and discover textual reuse in the Coptic transmission history, such as exact and fuzzy citations of Biblical passages in Coptic writers’ original texts,” Zeldes said.

The NEH is one of several organizations that have provided funding for the project. The latest grant will expand Coptic Scriptorium’s database to include a broader range of texts — a task that comes with its own set of challenges.

“We want to expand our inventory of corpora, but this means dealing with more heterogeneous data — from ‘messy’ standards in digitized out-of-copyright editions, to working with data from Optical Character Recognition,” Zeldes said. “We’re trying to adapt machine learning tools to be more error tolerant, and to develop workflows that can produce consistent results despite varying types of input.”

VIVID TRANSLATIONS

The Coptic Scriptorium project has brought students into the research fold for years, and Zeldes foresees even more opportunities for students following the most recent NEH grant.

“ in the past, and that will continue,” Zeldes said. “Just last week, I presented a paper with my student Mitchell Abrams at a conference in Belgium on the Coptic Universal Dependency Treebank, which allows researchers to examine Coptic syntax in the same format used to .”

Zeldes sees Coptic as a fascinating linguistic research subject for students to dive into, both for its place in the history of language and for the vivid content of translations.

“It’s the last stage of Ancient Egyptian, the language of the hieroglyphs, which makes it part of the longest continuously attested human language on Earth,” Zeldes said. “It really tells you about life in the early first millennium in Egypt, at a time when Christianity was starting out. … I’m always blown away when I can read what people were saying and thinking over 1500 years ago.”

NASA’s Astrobiology Program has awarded a nearly $7 million grant to an effort led by Georgetown Assistant Professor Sarah Stewart Johnson that is explicitly aimed at throwing out the assumption that life out in space will be like life here at home.

Over the next five years, the interdisciplinary project, called the , will develop a new class of life detection approaches for use on planetary missions—from the subsurface of the Red Planet to the farthest reaches of our solar system.

LIFE AS WE DON’T KNOW IT

“Time and again, we’ve been bowled over by the indescribable foreignness of other worlds,” said Johnson, the project’s principal investigator. Yet the search for extraterrestrial life often defaults to assumptions that arise from experiences with life detection on Earth.

“Detecting life in an agnostic fashion,” said deputy principal investigator Heather Graham of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “means not using characteristics particular to Earth life.”

For example, the team will consider states of disequilibrium with the surrounding environment, such as evidence of conspicuous chemical complexity or unexpected accumulations of chemical elements. They’ll also look for patterns of energy transfer in the hope that such aberrations could tip off the researchers to the existence of life.

The key for the project is to identify indicators that are not biased toward the specific type of biochemistry found on Earth. The life detection methods must also be suitable for eventual implementation on flight missions.

“Our goal is to go beyond what we currently understand and devise ways to find forms of life we can scarcely imagine,” Johnson said.

A SPECTRUM OF CERTAINTY

In another break from many existing efforts, the project will also explore ways to think about the discovery of life in terms of probabilities and thresholds, as opposed to seeking a simple “yes” or “no” as to whether life has been discovered.

“When you’re looking for extraterrestrial life, results may be messier than just ‘yes we found life’ or ‘no we didn’t,’” Johnson said. “To do that, we’ll need to think less about whether life fits our preconceptions of what life is, and more about how to quantify the difference between what we see and what we might expect from an abiotic environment.”

The project will therefore support computational efforts to develop probabilistic and theoretical models, some of which will depend on advanced algorithmic and machine learning techniques. It will also oversee the analysis of a wide array of organic and inorganic substrates, including abiotic extracts from meteorites, which will be used to develop and refine these tools and algorithms.

CONNECTING THE COMMUNITY

The project unites a diverse team of planetary scientists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and veteran instrument scientists from the United States and around the world.

In addition to Professor Johnson and Dr. Graham, the team includes Eric Anslyn (University of Texas at Austin), Pan Conrad (Carnegie Institute), Lee Cronin (University of Glasgow), Andrew Ellington (University of Texas at Austin), Jamie Elsila (NASA Goddard), Pete Girguis (Harvard University), Chris House (Pennsylvania State University), Chris Kempes (Santa Fe Institute), Eric Libby (Santa Fe Institute), Paul Mahaffy (NASA Goddard), Jay Nadeau (Portland State University), Barbara Sherwood Lollar (University of Toronto), and Andrew Steele (Carnegie Institute).

The Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures project is part of the NASA Astrobiology Program’s new Network for Life Detection (NfoLD), also announced this week.NfoLD is a multi-institution initiative focused on catalyzing and connecting the broader life detection research community. The Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures will form one of NfoLD’s core teams, along with teams led by the Georgia Institute of Technology and NASA Ames Research Center. Professor Johnson will serve as one of the new initiative’s co-leads.

You can follow the latest developments of the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures project, including publications and upcoming events, on . More information on NfoLD and NASA’s Astrobiology Program can be found .

The grants are both part of the Department of Energy’s recent $218 million initiative to promote quantum information science, which Secretary of Energy Rick Perry called “the next frontier in the Information Age.” Advances in quantum computing could lead to immensely more powerful supercomputers, sensors, and encryption devices.

Freericks is an expert on quantum physics, the study of how matter behaves in its smallest observable forms. He also made the news earlier this year when he was named the theory lead on a DOE-funded team to study X-ray scattering in solids.

HIGH-IMPACT APPLICATIONS

The first of Freericks’ grants will fund research on the quantum properties of systems that are driven and damped, like shock absorbers in cars. They’ll also be looking at frustration effects in magnets.

“The goal of this work is to find high-impact scientific applications on currently available quantum computers,” Freericks said. “The problem of how quantum particles respond to being pushed — by a field, like an electric field — remains one of the major unsolved problems in physics. Quantum computers are ideally situated to solve these problems, and the main objective of this work is to do this.”

Freericks and colleague Lex Kemper of North Carolina State University will partner with IBM, IONQ, and Intel, using quantum computers to analyze the systems. The grant will provide $1.25 million to fund a postdoctoral fellow and a graduate student at both universities for the next three years.

NEW SOFTWARE

Freericks is also part of a team working on a four-year, $8 million grant, that aims to develop software for use in quantum computing, which involves computers that use quantum principles rather than binary code.

“We take for granted that the real world can often be described as a system in equilibrium at a fixed temperature,” Freericks said. “It’s a well-known and difficult problem to set up quantum computers at a fixed temperature. The work supported by this grant seeks to find efficient ways to allow quantum computers to describe these real-world situations”

The grant is housed within Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. At Georgetown, Freericks will test the software’s ability to solve complex scientific problems — in particular, how to initialize a quantum computer to solve how strongly interacting electrons in a solid behave. These systems give rise to exotic phenomena such as quantum entanglement, magnetic frustration, and high-temperature superconductivity. The grant will fund one graduate student to assist Freericks over the next four years.

Diana Kapiszewski

is a co-Principal Investigator on a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support a project on “.”  The project aims to harmonize standards for informed consent agreements and data management practices, and to construct socio-technical infrastructure. The broader goal is to facilitate the long-term preservation and ethical sharing of sensitive research data generated from human participants, so those data can be available for re-use by scientists conducting related research in the future.

Kapiszewski co-directs the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) with Prof. Colin Elman (Syracuse University), the Principal Investigator on the grant. QDR is partnering on the project with Dr. Lynette Hoelter and Prof. Margaret Levenstein of the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The two-year, $299,787 grant is supported by the Public Access Initiative, which is managed by the NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure.

Marko Klasnja

won the American Political Science Association 2018 award for best paper on class and inequality for his work on the paper “Ideology of Affluence: Explanations for Inequality and Political Attitudes among Rich Americans.” Klasnja and colleagues Elizabeth Suhay of American University and Gonzalo Rivero of Westat examine whether affluent Americans are more likely than others to believe economic inequality stems from merit as opposed to circumstance. To answer the question, they conducted an original survey, in which half of the respondents were drawn from the top 5 percent of the income/wealth distribution.

“We find that affluent Americans are more likely than others to say economic outcomes stem from individual characteristics,” they wrote. “Further, the top 1 percent tends to double down on the internalization of economic inequality, linking drive to succeed and intelligence to people’s choices as well as their genes. Finally, blaming individuals for economic outcomes is more consistently and strongly tied to economic conservatism among the affluent than others.”

Klasnja and his colleagues concluded that there exists an “ideology of affluence” that both individualizes economic inequality and opposes government efforts to ameliorate it.

Keir Lieber

won the American Political Science Association 2018 award for best paper in international security for “,” a collaboration with Professor Daryl G. Press of Dartmouth ������̳. Lieber and Press examine the future of second-strike capability — one of the founding assumptions of nuclear deterrence theory — in the context of modern technological advances. They assert that the gap in technological capacities is widening even among nuclear powers, to the point that some powers that formerly possessed second-strike capabilities can no longer be assumed to hold that status. “Counterforce” attacks — attacks that fully disable a state’s nuclear capacity — should now be considered plausible.

“Nuclear stalemate might endure among some pairs of states, and technology could someday reestablish the ease of deploying survivable arsenals,” Lieber and Press write. “Today, however, survivability is eroding, and it will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.”

Lahra Smith

has received RAPID funding from the National Science Foundation for a . Her research considers the way that citizens are educated following comprehensive and contested constitutional reforms; Kenya, which annulled its election results in August 2017, presents a compelling opportunity for further study.

“There is little research that focuses on teachers as agents in the process of citizen-formation,” Smith said. “Teaching students about the 2010 constitution requires not just new content but a revised history and a revised script about Kenyan identity.”

Smith will work with research assistants from a master’s teaching program at Kenyatta University, interviewing teachers in several counties in Kenya about the challenges of teaching new high school history and government curricula in the current political scene. The RAPID funding mechanism is designed for cases like Smith’s, where research must immediately follow an unanticipated event.

Peter Armbruster

Prof. Armbruster has received a $788,645 grant from the NIH to develop genomic tools to control and study the basic biology of the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus. Ae. albopictus is an invasive and medically important mosquito capable of transmitting dengue, Chikungunya, and Zika viruses. The rapid global range expansion of this species represents a significant public health concern. This interdisciplinary study will develop powerful and accessible genomic tools for the broader Ae. albopictus research community, establish a reference database to identify the origin of new invasions, and determine the genetic basis of life-history traits underpinning the geographic spread of this vector.

Shaun Brinsmade

Prof. Brinsmade has received a $2.2 million grant from the NIH to study how Staphylococcus aureus (e.g., methicillin-resistant S. aureus [MRSA]) switches from a harmless existence on our skin and in our noses to a harmful existence elsewhere, causing life threatening infections throughout the body. The project aims to determine mechanistically how S. aureus uses a bacterial protein called CodY and the availability of key nutrients during infection to produce toxins and cause tissue damage. The work has the potential to reveal new avenues for developing antimicrobials, which limit persistence and disease at a time when many of our antibiotics are ineffective.

Thomas Coate

New grant to study the molecular basis of auditory wiring

Prof. Coate has received a $1.9 million grant from the NIH to study Pou3f4, a transcription factor expressed by otic mesenchyme cells in the cochlea, mutations of which can cause human hearing loss. Coate aims to determine the function of Pou3f4 in axon guidance, transcriptional regulation, and neuronal survival in the auditory system. work is expected to determine new guidance mechanisms required for appropriate auditory connectivity, complementing ongoing work by others on neurotrophins, gene therapy, or cell replacement strategies.

New grant to study ATP signaling in auditory wiring

The Coate laboratory has also received a $492,407 award from the Mathers Foundation to investigate neural connectivity in the auditory system, with focus on a receptor called P2X3, activated by adenosine triphosphate. This is a collaborative project between the Coate laboratory — known for expertise in cell biology — and the laboratory of Dr. Dwight Bergles at Johns Hopkins — known for expertise in auditory synaptic physiology and calcium imaging.

Jeffrey Huang

Prof. Huang received a $1.7 million grant from the NIH to investigate if amino acid metabolism in central nervous system demyelinated lesions regulates inflammation to enable myelin repair in mice. The results of this study, if successful, will clarify the role of amino acid metabolism on immune cells in CNS remyelination. This could improve our understanding of the immunoregulatory mechanisms governing remyelination, potentially helping the development of pharmacological therapies for multiple sclerosis patients.

Kathy Maguire-Zeiss

Prof. Maguire-Zeiss was awarded a multi-PI 5-year R01 grant with Kathy Conant from the NIH/NINDS entitled “Perineuronal proteolysis and circuit dysfunction in HAND.” Cognitive dysfunction in HIV-infected individuals continues in the era of combined antiretroviral treatment, suggesting that adjunct therapeutics targeting this issue are needed. Maguire-Zeiss will test the hypothesis that HIV-relevant stimuli can stimulate matrix metalloproteinase-dependent perineuronal net processing in vitro and in vivo, with consequent effects on hippocampal parvalbumin activity, neuronal population dynamics, and memory consolidation.

Janet Mann

Prof. Mann and co-investigator Celine Frere of University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland were awarded a NSF-IOS grant, “The Impact of Maternal Effects on Social Plasticity and Fitness Variation in a Long-Lived Mammal.” This grant is among the largest awarded through Animal Behavior-IOS and is one of the top 10 priorities of NSF for understanding gene-environment interactions outside of the laboratory.

Leslie Ries

Prof. Ries has been awarded a $55,021 grant from the NSF to study the impact of Hurricane Harvey on monarch butterfly migration. Atlantic hurricanes regularly impact a major portion of migratory flyways and tend to occur around the times of major fall migration, and Harvey was the biggest single rainfall event on record in the U.S. However, most research on the ecological impact of hurricanes has been on birds. This research will examine the effects of Harvey on monarch dynamics in the local Texas migratory corridor and evaluate the potential for carry-over effects into the monarch’s overwintering population in Mexico and summer breeding population in central and eastern North America. We will also examine the implications for increased hurricane intensity and frequency that is occurring due to global climate warming.

Mark Rose

Prof. Rose has been awarded a $2 million NIH grant to study cellular processes in a model organism, baker’s yeast, which uses genes similar to the human genes. Cells fuse during fertilization and development, creating diploid organisms, and then undergo meiosis to produce haploid gametes for fertilization. Problems with any of these processes can lead to significant health effects. Rose’s research aims to provide a better understanding of the roles of these processes in human cell biology and disease.

Anne Rosenwald

Prof. Rosenwald has received a $22,595 grant from the NSF to pilot the Genomics Education Alliance (GEA), an organization to promote gene research among undergraduates. The GEA will bring together members of existing genomics education networks, leveraging their combined expertise to identify and curate common genome analysis tools, associated curricular and assessment materials, and faculty training strategies to facilitate the adoption of genomics instruction at any college or university. By making existing resources more broadly accessible, the GEA will enable faculty to guide undergraduate life science students participating in authentic genomic research projects. This will enhance the ability of students to become productive members of the technological workforce, to succeed in advanced studies in biology and related disciplines, and to be better-informed citizens and decision-makers.

Steven Singer

Prof. Singer’s $466,500 grant focuses on how the immune system first detects and responds to the waterborne parasite Giardia. Giardia infects a few hundred million people every year and contributes to childhood diarrhea. Singer’s research is aimed at figuring out how the immune system identifies Giardia as a pathogen — rather than as one of the beneficial microbes found in the gut, or as food that should be ignored. Singer suspects that early recognition determines the later outcome of this interaction and will attempt to identify molecular pathways involved.