Institutional Awards
Metropolitan Edison Company Sustainable Energy Fund of Berks County Community Foundation. $25,000 (Grant #2). (Matt Steiman, College Farm) “Waste to Energy: Practical Anaerobic Digestion System for Small to Mid-size Dairy Farms”
Faculty Awards
Partnership for Better Health, Perry County Health Coalition - Request for Consulting Services (Community Health Needs Review & Strategic Action Planning). $10,000. (Dave Sarcone, International Business & Management)
National Science Foundation - Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Pathways into the Earth, Ocean, Polar and Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences (IUSE:GEOPAths). $32,834. (Jorden Hayes, Earth Sciences) “Collaborative Research: GP-UP: GNOMES: A near surface geophysics field experience to improve the recruitment and retention of under-represented minority students in the geosciences” Undergraduate geoscience education in the United States lags behind other STEM fields when it comes to racial and ethnic diversity. This deficit is particularly notable for students who are underrepresented minorities (URM) in STEM fields and translates to a larger gap at the graduate level. With the aim of recruiting, engaging, and retaining a diverse group of students in geoscience majors, investigators from Rutgers University, Newark (RUN), Dickinson College, and Penn State University will submit a proposal to the IUSE:GEOPaths:UP Solicitation (20-516). We will propose a two-week long field experience to introduce students early in their post-secondary education to near surface geophysics within a critical zone context. The field experience will be held at two sites in the Chesapeake Basin, Shale Hills, PA, and Pond Branch, MD, the latter of which is part of a recently awarded CZ Net proposal that aims to explore how geology pre-conditions critical zone form and function. The proposed program will build upon the success of a previous Geopaths:Extra program and expand to focus more on mentor development and post-program engagement, which were found to be unexpectedly impactful components of the past program. Participants will be recruited from RUN, Dickinson College, and two-year colleges in Northern New Jersey that have strong connections with RUN (e.g., Passaic County Community College, Essex Community College).
National Science Foundation - Frontier Research in Earth Sciences. $94,945.(Ben Edwards, Earth Sciences). “Collaborative Research: Ice Forcing in Arc Magma Plumbing Systems (IF-AMPS)” Observations of increased global volcanic activity following the last glacial maximum (LGM; Huybers & Langmuir, 2009) and orbital pacing of volcanism on longer time scales (Kutterolf et al., 2019) have spurred considerable interest in the role of climate in driving changes in the solid earth. Although advances have been made in quantifying connections between tectonics and earth surface processes (NRC, 2012), linkages between magma, volcanoes, climate, and topography remain far less well understood (NAS, 2017, p. 76; Sternai et al., 2019). Thus, a major underlying question is: How do changes in the climate system interact with the lithosphere and magma reservoirs housed within it? (Jellinek et al., 2004; Watt et al., 2013; Sternai et al., 2016; 2019; Rawson et al., 2016; Schindlbeck et al., 2018; Mora & Tassara, 2019; Wilson & Russell, 2020). To address this question, we propose to conduct a novel blend of field observations, lab measurements, and numerical model simulations in an integrated study of links between the cryosphere, topography, and subduction zone volcanism. This collaboration is being led by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Other collaborators are from the University of Oregon at Eugene, University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, and Brown University.
National Park Service - Supplement. $29,867.42. (Matthew Pinsker, History) “Select Newspaper Digitizing for Slave Stampedes Project” This select newspaper digitization effort is designed to support the ongoing Slave Stampedes on the Missouri Border1ands cooperative agreement between the House Divided Project and the National Park Service Network to Freedom. We will be digitizing up to 50 reels of microfilm for internal research use from a variety of holdings in Missouri and Illinois.
Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies - Visiting Scholars Program. $25,000. (Santiago Anria, Political Science) “Social Movements, Polarization, and Democratic Regime Trajectories in Latin America”
Student Awards
