The W Awards
Compelling new research projects get a boost through the College’s innovative grant program
By Daniel P. Smith
After a successful launch in 2016, the W Awards have returned.
An internal grant program designed to spark scholarly inquiry among College faculty, the Weinberg College Research and Innovation Grants — the W Awards, for short — provide seed funding for exploratory research, including innovative new work, significant changes in research direction and new collaborative ventures.
Selected by a faculty review committee, this year’s W Award winners include a dozen faculty projects touching a diverse array of topics ranging from political science and psychology to anthropology and chemistry. The honorees are:
- Professor Karen Alter and assistant professor Stephen Nelson of the Department of Political Science. They will investigate a puzzling question in global economic governance: why have the rules governing countries’ policies toward international trade become increasingly precise, legally binding and enforceable, while the international rules pertaining to countries’ management of their currencies remain ad hoc, non-binding and largely unenforceable?
- Assistant professor Katie Amato and professors Chris Kuzawa and Tom McDade of the Department of Anthropology, who will work with the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey in the Philippines to study the gut microbiota and its influence on host nutrition, immune system function and behavior.
- Professor Peter Fenves in the Department of German and professor Alessia Ricciardi in the Department of French and Italian, who will examine the dynamic interplay of messianic and utopian motifs in Europe from the late 1700s to the early 2000s by looking at both Moses Mendelssohn’s entrance into the German reading public and Goethe’s contemporaneous decision to roam freely through Italy.
- Professor Matt Goldrick in the Department of Linguistics and assistant Vijay Mittal in the Department of Psychology, who will determine if speech can provide a reliable biological test of motor-control difficulties that can serve as an early indication of susceptibility to psychotic disorders.
- Assistant professor Doug Kiel in the Department of History, who will chronicle the emergence of Native American homelessness in the first half of the 20th century, specifically delving into the root causes of Native homelessness such as violence, trauma, dispossession and vagrancy laws.
- Professor Sara Monoson in the Department of Political Science, who looks to advance her expertise in “classical reception studies” and further examine when, why and how the ancient Greek past gets marshalled in American political discourse.
- Professor Ishwar Radhakrishnan in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, who aims to update and expand MONSTER, a computational tool used by structural and molecular biologists to identify and catalog non-covalent interactions in high-resolution structures of macromolecular complexes.
- Professor Cynthia Robin in the Department of Anthropology, who will map the central two square kilometers of the ancient Maya city of Aventura during a four-week archaeological survey in an effort to investigate humans’ ability to create sustainable cities.
- Assistant professor Onnie Rogers in the Department of Psychology, who will weave together developmental psychology, culture and education to study the strategies Black girls use as they negotiate the contradicting narratives about who and what they are and can become in society.
- Associate professor Helen Tilley in the Department of History, who will co-translate the 1910 book Ìwé Ìwòsàn (Book of Healing), one of the few accounts of historical African healing cultures that exist in printed form.
- Professor Wendy Wall in the Department of English, who will investigate how a writer enters the traditional Anglophone canon of literature by studying a recently discovered 17th century manuscript from previously unknown English female writer Hester Pulter.
- Professor Emily Weiss in the Department of Chemistry, who will develop tools with enough temporal resolution to document as-yet undetected synaptic events and, therefore, reshape the present-day view of synaptic function and its role in diseases like Parkinson’s.
“The W Awards are to catalyze and support new and exciting research endeavors,” says Kelly Mayo, associate dean for research and graduate studies. “They are an investment in Weinberg College faculty and a recognition of the diverse and important scholarship in which they engage.”
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