Skip To Content Skip To Menu Skip To Footer

Grant Awards 2015-2016

Institutional Awards

Partnership for Better Health. $2,000. (Joyce Bylander, Student Life) The CONNECT/CALC Collaboration between Dickinson College and Carlisle Arts Learning Center is a four-week summer program that is targeted at enriching the lives of at-risk teens.

IIE Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) program, $12,790. (Sonja Paulsen, CGSE). Dickinson requests one Portuguese Teaching Assistant for 2016-2017 academic year. The FLTA will work in the Spanish & Portuguese department for 18 hours per week under the supervision of Carolina Castellanos, Assistant Professor. FLTA will enroll in at least two (2) courses per semester, audit or credit, using tuition waivers issued annually to Center for Global Study & Engagement.

IIE Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) program, $12,790.  (Sonja Paulsen, CGSE). Dickinson requests one Arabic Teaching Assistant for 2016-2017 academic year. The FLTA will work in the Middle East Studies department for 18 hours per week under the supervision of Magda Siekert, Lecturer. FLTA will enroll in at least two (2) courses per semester, audit or credit, using tuition waivers issued annually to Center for Global Study & Engagement.

Pennsylvania Consortium for the Liberal Arts (PCLA) – Opportunity Grant.  $7,750.  (Christine Bombaro/LIS with colleagues from Gettysburg, Lafayette, and Swarthmore Colleges) “Implementing the New Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education at PCLA Libraries.” This project will provide the opportunity for librarians in the PCLA to discuss issues surrounding the newly-adopted Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and to develop plans of action to implement the Framework’s principles, both individually and in partnership with one another. This day‐long workshop will be held at Dickinson College during late spring 2016. It will be open to 75 participants from member institutions of the PCLA.

Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Foundation. $530,000.  This grant supplements our existing Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Scholarship Fund to provide additional tuition assistance to worthy students to support their pursuit of a Dickinson College undergraduate education.

NSF Logo2

 

 

 

National Science Foundation (NSF). $12,000. (Julie Vastine, ALLARM). “Learning to See, Seeing to Learn: A Sociotechnical System Supporting Taxonomic Identification Activities in Volunteer-Based Water Quality Biomonitoring” is an Innovations in Development proposal to build and study a cyber-enhanced visual learning environment to support observational practices and classification skills in a citizen science context. Our project focuses on the particular challenge of training volunteers to collect high-quality and reliable data—in this case, biotic data for water quality assessment projects. ALLARM is a partner in this larger project with the lead institution, Carnegie Mellon University.

Faculty Awards

National Geographic Waitt Grants Program. $12,450. (Maria Bruno, Anthropology/Archaeology) “Understanding Climate Change, Landscape Creation, and Indigenous Socio-Political Histories on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes”

Adams County Community Foundation. $750. (Asunción Arnedo, Spanish). Arnedo was awarded this grant for continuation of the 2015 project, “Migrant Farm Labor Health Outreach - Upper Adams County.” Since 2007, Asunción has been teaching a Spanish course at Dickinson College (Spanish for the Health Professions) which has included, since 2010, an annual service-learning project. The project involves students performing volunteer work four hours a week at health clinics. The clinics serve Spanish-speaking orchard workers in Adams Counties during the fall apple season. The great majority of individuals who visit the clinics are migrant workers from Mexico who come to Pennsylvania each year for the apple harvest. Through a partnership with Keystone Health and their Migrant Health Program, Dickinson students provide volunteer work interpreting for the Spanish speaking farm workers and the English-speaking health providers.

Penn State University - Materials Research Facilities Network (MRFN) Faculty Fellowship 2016. $4,000. (Sarah St. Angelo, Chemistry) “Titan and Talos Microscopy for Ultrasmall Copper Nanoparticles” Ultrasmall copper nanoparticles have been produced in the Pl’s lab by using a greener synthetic method. MRFN Faculty Fellowships in recent years have made it possible to accurately determine the size and composition of these nanoparticles, which have diameters of less than 5 nm. The synthesis and characterization of these unusual nanoparticles resulted in a publication with Dickinson student co-authors and several presentations by the Pl and students. The Pl and student researchers have continued working with the ultrasmall copper nanoparticles to learn about their catalytic activity. The particles have demonstrated catalytic activity with model reduction reactions, and this project will require on-going characterization of the nanoparticles via electron microscopy. The MRFN Fellowship pays for instrument time and technical support for the Pl to characterize nanoparticles at Penn State University’s Materials Characterization Laboratory, particularly on the FEI Titan3 and Talos F200X microscopes. The copper nanoparticles have not yet been interrogated with these more powerful instruments. The Titan and Talos instruments are capable of providing higher resolution images with concurrent element mapping of particles that are difficult or impossible to image with other less powerful electron microscopes. Better microscopy and composition data will help support additional publications related to the catalytic activity of the particles and may provide better understanding of their previously observed oxidative stability. 

NSF Logo2National Science Foundation (supplement to existing grant). $7,922. (Peter Sak and Jorden Hayes, Earth Sciences) “Using Seismic Refraction to Image the Deep Critical Zone, Basse-Terre Island, Guadeloupe” We are requesting a supplement to EAR-1251969 to cover the costs associated with conducting seismic refraction surveys to determine the depth of weathering. The extent of weathering defines the critical zone. This is the life sustaining veneer of planet Earth that provides nutrients to plants and void space for groundwater storage and flow. The proposed work leverages the recent hire of Jorden Hayes, an expert in near-surface geophysics to extend our understanding of weathering processes within the tropics beneath the zone which is accessible by hand augering and direct observation of existing excavations and exposures. Specifically, we plan to complete a minimum of four seismic refraction profiles.

Social Science Research Council - Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship Program for ABDs and Recent PhDs. ~$30,000. (Evan Young, History) “Family Matters: Managing Illness in Late Tokugawa Japan”

NEH LogoNational Endowment for the Humanities - Summer Seminars for College and University Teachers. $2,700. (Jon Cogliano, Economics) “The History of Political Economy” Professor Cogliano will participate in an institute entitled “The History of Political Economy.” The three-week program will be held at Duke University’s Center for the History of Political Economy and directed by Bruce Caldwell, Research Professor of Economics at Duke and Director of the Center. 

The Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds. $25,000. (Julie Vastine/ALLARM; Heather Bedi/Environmental Studies.)  “Taking the pulse of Pennsylvania’s watershed movement.” ALLARM and Heather Bedi will be partnering with Kathy Brazier (Penn State University) to assess the current status of community-based watershed organizations in the state of Pennsylvania. There are three project goals: 1) to develop an inventory of watershed organizations in Pennsylvania; 2) to write a comprehensive summary of the changes and developments in the watershed community from 2005 through 2015; and 3) to write a white paper on the status of Pennsylvania’s aquatic citizen science programs to inform the development of a Pennsylvania Water Monitoring Council. This grant will develop essential tools to understand the Pennsylvania watershed movement to inform current and future policy initiatives as well as identify gaps in the field to make community collaborations more effective.

Partnership for Better Health. $3,000 (Asuncion Arnedo, Spanish). Arnedo seeks support for continuation of the Partnership’s 2015 project, “Migrant Farm Labor Health Outreach - Upper Adams County.”  Since 2007 Asuncion has been leading an annual service-learning project that is part of a Spanish course at Dickinson College (Spanish for the Health Professions). The project involves students performing volunteer work four hours a week at health clinics. The clinics serve Spanish-speaking orchard workers in Adams and Franklin Counties during the fall apple season. The great majority of individuals who visit the clinics are migrant workers from Mexico who come to Pennsylvania each year for the apple harvest. Through a partnership with Keystone Health and their Migrant Health Program, Dickinson students provide volunteer work interpreting for the Spanish speaking farm workers and the English-speaking health providers.

National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health – Academic Research Enhancement Award (R15). $330,176. Award Number R15CA194937. (Marie Helweg-Larsen, Psychology) “The effects of stigmatizing U.S. and Danish smokers” People often stigmatize smokers and many public health messages are stigmatizing. Stigmatization has also been proposed as a public health strategy to decrease smoking prevalence. But does stigmatization actually motivate quitting or does it have the opposite effect? The answer to this question has important implications for health education programs, smoking cessation programs, and public health policy. We know little about how smokers react to stigmatization and the causal consequences. Particularly understudied are reactions to stigma within social contexts such as culture and social status. In the proposed research, guided by the Model of Stigma Induced Identity Threat, two experimental studies in the U.S. and Denmark will examine the effects of stigmatizing smokers among people of various levels of social status. This research will provide valuable insights into the consequences of stigmatization and lay the groundwork for more effective educational interventions and smoking cessation programs. Thus, this research will contribute to reaching the Healthy People 2020 objective of reducing adult cigarette smoking in the U.S. to 12 percent from the 2012 rate of 18 percent. The NIH provided 98.63 percent of the funding for this project, while Dickinson provided 1.37 percent ($4,600 – not included in award amount listed above).

Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) Visiting Scholars Program. $26,000. (Rebecca Connor, Chemistry)

Duke University Humanities Writ Large Visiting Faculty Fellowship. Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy (Africana Studies).  Prof. van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy will work on the completion of two complementary scholarly projects: a book manuscript entitled Rapso and Revolution: Musical Performance, Activism, and the Postcolonial Subject in Trinidad, plus a 30-minute short of a documentary film, Rapso Chants. While at Duke, she will also plan the development of a Caribbean Arts Oral History Digital Archive that would integrate Dickinson students in the collection and archiving of primary documents. This archive would be available to them for analysis in their academic work, while also making these important resources available to a broad audience interested in Caribbean arts, society, and oral history narrations. The Fellowship covers full salary, benefits and a $5000 research fund.

NEH Logo

 

 

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend Program. $6,000. (Amy Wlodarski, Music) “Postwar Humanism and the Music of George Rochberg.”  Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected proposals from around the nation. The Endowment awards grants to top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.

NHCNational Humanities Center – Fellowship. $55,000. (Blake Wilson, Music) “Dominion of the Ear: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry in Early Modern Italy”

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars, $80,000. (Shawn Bender, East Asian Studies). “Engineering the Aging Society: Robotics, Vital Futures, and Imaginations of Life in Japan and Europe.” Engineering the Aging Society examines, on the one hand, how Japanese roboticists construct Japan’s aging population as a future problem only their technologies can solve and, on the other, how users at home and abroad respond to the robots they create. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, Denmark, and Germany among roboticists, caregivers, and individual users, the project interrogates the problematization of population aging, and offers a way to conceptualize the social impact of so-called care robots for the aged. In doing so, Engineering the Aging Society traces the logics by which imaginations of the future influence the lives of people and pathways of technological innovation in the present. Bender will work on this project at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, Harvard University during academic year 2017-2018. These fellowships support long-term, unusually ambitious projects in the humanities and related social sciences. The ultimate goal of the project should be a major piece of scholarly work by the applicant.

UK National Health Service NIHR-HTA, $66,785. Suman Ambwani (Psychology). In collaboration with her colleagues at Kings College London, Professor Ambwani will conduct “A multicentre, investigator blind, randomised 6/12 parallel group study to examine the feasibility, acceptability and efficacy of supplementing inpatient care with guided self-management tools for patients with or without adjunct career guidance.”  The current study employs a recovery-based, collaborative approach to the self-management of eating disorders.

PSI CHI, the International Honor Society in Psychology, 2014-2015 Psi Chi Faculty Advisor Research Grant. $2,000. (Suman Ambwani, Psychology). “But why do we continue to fat talk? An experimental investigation of college women’s reactions to body disparaging conversations.”

Paul Sacher Stiftung – Research Grant. $13,860. (Amy Wlodarski, Music) “Postwar Humanism and the Music of George Rochberg.”

Rare Book School – William T. Buice III Scholarship. $1,395. (Chelsea Skalak, English) “The Medieval Manuscript in the Twenty-First Century”

Student Awards

Environmental Protection Agency Greater Research Opportunities (EPA-GRO) Program. $50,000. (Caroline Kanaskie ’17, Environmental Science). The EPA-GRO program encourages promising students to pursue careers in environmentally-related fields and to continue their education beyond the baccalaureate level. The program will help offset two years of college costs, plus provide an internship with EPA in summer 2016.  

Environmental Protection Agency Greater Research Opportunities (EPA-GRO) Program. $50,000. (Keziah Groth-Tuft ’17, International Studies). The EPA-GRO program encourages promising students to pursue careers in environmentally-related fields and to continue their education beyond the baccalaureate level. The program will help offset two years of college costs, plus provide an internship with EPA in summer 2016.