The Office of Grants and Contracts congratulates Albert and Lena Keiser Assistant Professor of Art and Digital Studies, Joelle Dietrick, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Digital Studies, Owen Mundy, on an Immersive Scholar Residency from North Carolina State University Libraries, funded by the Mellon Foundation.

The $25,000 award contributed to the development of “Tally Saves the Internet,” a free, web-based game which alerts users to webpage data tracking, allowing players to battle and block capture of their online actions and protect their data privacy. Development of Tally offered experiential learning opportunities for several Davidson student researchers. Professors Dietrick and Mundy previewed the game at the October 2020 Immersive Scholar Symposium hosted by North Carolina State University.

The digital and creative efforts of Professors Dietrick and Mundy have been recognized and funded through organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, North Carolina Arts Council, Center for Long-Term Security at the University of California at Berkeley, MacDowell Colony, Resilient Network, Bacca Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Davidson College.

The Office of Grants and Contracts congratulates Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Latin American Studies, and Chair of Africana Studies, Devyn Spence Benson on a Presidential Authority grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.

The $50,000 Race, Ethnicity and Immigration program grant funds the project “Black Migration in a White City: Power, Privilege, and Exclusion in Cuban America.” Professor Benson, with collaborator Danielle Clealand of the University of Texas at Austin, will analyze oral histories, census, and archival data from Afro-Cubans to examine their socioeconomic status, educational trajectories, political attitudes, and voting behaviors.

Noting that “much of the literature in the social sciences and humanities treats Latinos as not only racially homogenous, but victims of exclusion and social and economic inequality.  Our book urges scholars to recognize that white privilege is relevant for Latino communities and that race matters for socioeconomic outcomes.” 

This prestigious award follows Professor Benson’s 2019 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, book-length study of Afro-Cuban intellectual life during the 1970’s, “Black Consciousness in Cuba:  The Untold Revolution, 1968 – 1978.” We congratulate Professor Benson on these prestigious awards for her research.

Registration is required for each session. If a session has reached capacity for the Zoom webinar, you may stream the presentation on YouTube Live. Please visit the registration webpage on the session date for the YouTube Live link. All webinars will be recorded and made available on the NSF Resource Center webpage following the event.

Contact the Office of Grants and Contracts to discuss proposal planning and research funding opportunities.

The Ford Foundation Fellowship program for early-career faculty members aims “to increase the diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.”

Three Ford Fellowship winners (Martha-Elizabeth Baylor, Associate Professor of Physics and Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Carleton College and Chair of the American Physical Society Committee on Education; LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, Professor of Africana Studies and former Associate Dean of the Faculty at Williams College; and Taneisha Means, Assistant Professor of Political Science on the Class of 1951 Chair at Vassar College, who’s also affiliated with Vassar’s Africana Studies and Women’s Studies Programs) will provide a panel discussion of how they approached the grant competition, plus Q&A with participants.

This webinar should be useful for faculty at liberal arts colleges who are interested in applying for the Ford Fellowship in 2020 (or further into the future) and would like a sense of how colleagues at liberal arts colleges have approached the competition.

Please register using this form to participate in the webinar.

The Office of Grants and Contracts congratulates Assistant Professor of Physics, Michelle Kuchera, and Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, Raghu Ramanujan, on a National Science Foundation Research in Undergraduate Institutions – RUI grant (2012865).

The three-year project titled, “Machine Learning Approaches for Accelerating Scientific Discovery in Nuclear Physics,” enables collaboration between theoretical and experimental nuclear physicists and computer scientists to aid in scientific discoveries using state-of-the-art machine learning methods at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Argonne National Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and the upcoming Electron Ion Collider.

The grant provides Davidson students who have an interest in physics, computer science, or mathematics with the opportunity to make significant contributions to national efforts which investigate fundamental properties of matter. To accomplish this, they work closely with world-renowned scientists at large-scale research facilities, which complements the experiences students enjoy at a small liberal arts institution. The students also have the opportunity to visit these laboratories and to present their work to a national audience at professional scientific conferences.

This NSF-funded project will be an integral part of the ALPhA group (Algorithms for Learning in Physics Applications), an ongoing research collaboration headed by Professors Kuchera and Ramanujan and driven by Davidson students. In addition to providing interdisciplinary research experiences that bridge nuclear physics, artificial intelligence, and data science, the project seeks to create an environment where students from different backgrounds – including women and students from traditionally underrepresented groups – can explore and launch their careers in scientific research.

We are very proud of this national recognition and support for the research conducted by the ALPhA group, under the leadership of Professors Kuchera and Ramanujan.

Four recent Guggenheim Fellowship winners will provide a panel discussion of how they approached the grant competition, plus Q&A with participants. The featured panelists will be Myriam J.A. Chancy, Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College; John Cort, Professor Emeritus of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University; Pradip Malde, Professor of Art at the University of the South; and Philip Metres, Professor of English at John Carroll University. 

This webinar should be useful for faculty at liberal arts colleges who are interested in applying for the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 (or further into the future) and would like a sense of how colleagues at liberal arts colleges have approached the competition. The Guggenheim is a fairly unusual fellowship, so this webinar may provide some helpful insights even for faculty who are seasoned grant applicants.

Please register using this form to participate.

The Office of Grants and Contracts congratulates Assistant Professor of Physics, Anthony Kuchera on a National Science Foundation grant (2011398).

The $176,680 Collaborative Research at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) award titled “Study of Exotic Nuclear and Neutron Detector Response,” is a 3-year collaboration between Professor Kuchera and Professor Warren Rogers of Indiana Wesleyan University, who received a similar award. Both professors are  members of the Modular Neutron Array (MoNA) Collaboration which consists of faculty from primarily undergraduate institutions and Michigan State University.

The grant provides funding for 6 Davidson research students who will work alongside the collaborative team consisting of professors, graduate students, and postdocs. The students will be involved at every step of the research project, including weekly video conferences, participation in experiments, and attending professional conferences. There are typically limited opportunities for students to learn nuclear science in the classroom – particularly for undergraduate students in a small liberal arts setting – and this opportunity for training in research at state-of-the-art national facilities has the potential for producing the next generation of nuclear scientists who are also widely educated in the broader context of the humanities and social sciences.

The collaborative team will perform experiments using the Modular Neutron Array at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) in Michigan – the largest radioactive beam facility in the United States – as well as at Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The focus of the project is to study the properties of atomic nuclei that have many more neutrons than protons.

“We use beams of radioactive particles to undergo nuclear reactions and produce short-lived nuclei that decay by giving off their excess neutrons. We use MoNA to detect these neutrons while simultaneously detecting the remaining nucleus. Our measurements help guide and verify modern models of the nucleus. Additionally, our work at LANSCE focuses on understanding the details of how our neutron detectors work by using a beam of neutrons to interact with them. We measure properties such as the neutrons’ scattering pattern and energy which we will use to improve simulations of neutron interactions.”

Professor Kuchera is the only pre-tenure (and youngest) faculty member of the Modular Neutron Array (MoNA) collaboration at NSCL and serves as Executive Director. We congratulate him on his accomplishments, and this competitive NSF grant.

Three recent American Council of Learned Societies’ Fellowship winners (Eduardo Moncada, assistant professor of political science at Barnard College; Christina Neilson, associate professor of Renaissance and Baroque art history at Oberlin College; and Brent Rodríguez-Plate, professor of religious studies and media studies at Hamilton College–project abstracts available at the links) will provide a panel discussion of how they approached the grant competition, plus Q&A with participants.

This webinar should be useful for faculty at liberal arts colleges who are interested in applying for the ACLS Fellowship and would like a sense of how colleagues at liberal arts colleges have approached the competition. The next two rounds of the ACLS Fellowship are restricted to untenured faculty members who earned their PhDs no more than eight years ago. All of our panelists received the award as untenured faculty, which we hope will make their advice particularly relevant to this year’s applicant pool.

Please register using this form to participate.

The Fulbright Program has opportunities to match varying goals and availability. There are over 450 awards in more than 125 countries, and many are open to all disciplines. The complete list of opportunities can be found in the Catalog of Awards. Opportunities range from 2 to 12 months in length and include flexible options for multiple shorter visits to many host countries. Additionally, some awards provide dependent support for scholars wishing to bring family members. U.S. citizenship is required.

For more information, visit cies.org or contact scholars@iie.org.

The Office of Grants and Contracts congratulates Malcolm O. Partin Assistant Professor of Sociology, Joseph Ewoodzie Jr., on a National Science Foundation CAREER award (1944961). 

The $400,000 grant will support the project titled, “Transnational Lives in the U.S.” This 5-year project aims to use the experiences of Ghanaian migrants to the U.S. to investigate gaps in current transnational literature along three main lines of inquiry: motivations, processes and consequences. Along with undergraduate student researchers, Professor Ewoodzie will use a mixed methods approach that will include: collecting data from a historical letter archive of over 2,000 letters; oral histories of families who began traveling to the U.S. in the early 1980s; and ethnographic studies in Atlanta, GA, Bronx, NY and Accra, Ghana. During two years of the project, Professor Ewoodzie also plans to teach a seminar on Globalization and Social Change titled “The African Migration Experience” which will culminate in a two-week trip to Ghana for up to twelve students.

The CAREER is NSF’s most prestigious research award, with the vast majority of awardees hailing from large research-intensive universities.  Professor Ewoodzie’s accomplishment is especially notable since it follows his successful 2018 NSF REU grant (1757506) “Collaborative REU Site: Examining the Intersection of Food, Housing and Healthcare,” in the Beatties Ford Road Corridor, Charlotte, NC, which will host its final season summer 2020.