Institutional Awards
PA Department of Human Services, Office of Child Development and Early Learning - Keystone STARS Continuous Quality Improvement Award. $6,500. (Gina VanKirk, Dickinson College Children’s Center)
George I. Alden Trust – Higher Education Program. $150,000. This grant will support the purchase of a state-of-the-art benchtop spinning-disk confocal microscope to replace our 21-year-old point scanning confocal microscope. It will support courses and research for several hundred students per year in biology, chemistry, biochemistry & molecular biology, neuroscience, environmental science, and physics & astronomy. The administrative aspects of this project will be overseen by Professors John Henson and Kirsten Guss, who will also provide support for other faculty and students who will use the technology.
Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Foundation (through Vanguard Charitable). $100,000. 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.
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. $22,000. (Jinnie Monismith, Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring) “Southern Tier New York Susquehanna Basin Monitoring Program” The Susquehanna River Basin Commission coordinated a proposal with partners, including Dickinson's Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring to coordinate water quality monitoring in the Upper Susquehanna, with a focus on New York. At present, the partners recognize that there’s the absence of a central coordinating body for water quality monitoring data collection and assessment efforts within the Susquehanna Basin in New York. The partnership, in coordination with NYDEC, will provide support for compiling/coordinating information on existing efforts, assessing existing conditions and gaps in monitoring, and develop and implement an action plan to direct stakeholder resources in a more targeted/efficient manner given NYDEC’s 305(b)/303(d) interests, Bay/TMDL pollutant reduction efforts, BMP/watershed restoration efforts and other water quality priorities. This initiative will also provide NYDEC with a more efficient means of achieving its regional water quality monitoring and restoration goals through establishment of a coordinating body for organizations involved with water quality data collection and assessment work.
National Endowment for the Humanities. $36,250 (subaward). (James Gerencser, Archives and Special Collections) “Cultivating and Sustaining a Community of Practice: U.S. Indian Boarding School Records Curation” The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (CISDRC), which is managed through Dickinson’s Archives and Special Collections, has been included in a proposal as a subaward to catalog digitized federal records. Jim Gerencser, on behalf of the CISDRC, has been collaborating with the awardee of this grant for the past few years in the development of their National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive. The goal of the digital archive is to aggregate metadata from various online boarding school digital collections (such as CISDRC) so that users can search across collections. The subaward to Dickinson specifically provides funding to employ an individual to create descriptive metadata for a group of boarding school records (Entry 96 of Record Group 75 - outgoing correspondence of the Office of Indian Affairs on the subject of education, all in chronological order dating between 1875 and 1907), which are in the process of being digitized by CISDRC team members.
Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board – Grants for Reducing Underage and Dangerous Drinking. $50,000. (Missy Stine and Lauren Strunk, Wellness Center) “Alcohol Prevention for High-Risk Drinking and Harm Reduction at Dickinson College” The Wellness Center has implemented a comprehensive alcohol prevention program via funding from the PA Liquor Control Board (PLCB). This program is comprised of an alcohol peer education program whose primary goals are to facilitate programs that educate Dickinson students about ways to prevent high-risk drinking and harm reduction, enhance professional competency of staff and peer educators, and to administer an electronic survey that evaluates students’ alcohol/other substance use and related health concerns. Results of the survey will be utilized in a Social Norming campaign that corrects students’ misperceptions about alcohol/other substances.
Faculty Awards
Advanced Imaging Center at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research – Visiting Fellowship (partially funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation). (John Henson, Biology) “Investigating the 3D nanoscale interaction between astral ray microtubule tips, the centralspindlin kinesin-like protein MKLP1, and the cytokinetic contractile ring in an early embryo”
National Endowment for the Humanities – Fellowship. $60,000. (Say Burgin, History)
National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) – Student Observing Support Program. $19,691. (Olivia Wilkins, Chemistry) “High-Resolution Imaging of Deuterated Methanol in Orion KL” This funding will support two summer students at Dickinson, one each in 2025 and 2026, to investigate deuterated (i.e., "heavy") methanol in interstellar space. The relative abundances of deuterated methanol ([CH2DOH]/[CH3OD]) in star-forming regions deviate from the statistically expected ratio of 3. In Orion KL, the closest high-mass star-forming region to the solar system, the observed ratio is about 1. Why Orion KL and other massive star-forming regions harbor three times as much CH3OD (relative to CH2DOH) than expected has been asked for three decades. ALMA Cycle 9 data (ALMA #2022.1.00016.S; PI: Wilkins) are available to address this question by enabling high spatial resolution mapping of the singly-deuterated methanol isotopomers across Orion KL. This project will address the following questions: How does gas-phase CH2DOH abundance depend on temperature? How does the [CH2DOH]/[CH3OD] ratio change in different regions of Orion KL? How does proximity to protostellar cores affect [CH2DOH]/[CH3OD]? Support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation through award SOSPADA-038 from the NRAO.
National Program for Scientific Research and Advanced Studies (PROCIENCIA). (Amalia Pesantes Villa, Anthropology) “Gemas: Género, Masculinidades y Salud en el Perú (Gender Masculinities and Health in Peru)” The main objective of the study “Gemas: Gender, Masculinities and Health in Peru” is to generate evidence that allows health policies to adopt a gender approach that considers masculinities, and how these can generate barriers to access to health care. Health services. By doing this, the study hopes to contribute to a field of research that has been neglected in Peru, and in general in the world, studies of masculinities and health. To achieve this objective, this study will focus on a disease, Tuberculosis, a disease of high incidence and prevalence in Peru, which is considered a poverty trap, despite having free and effective treatments for most cases. In Peru and the world, the majority of infections occur in young men, and it is men who tend to have worse adherence and treatment results. The study will be carried out in one of the areas with the highest incidence of Tuberculosis in Peru, San Juan de Lurigancho in Lima, and will include a qualitative component (interviews with users of Tuberculosis services), and health workers. The quantitative study includes an analysis of the records of the National Tuberculosis Control Program and the National Death Registry (SINADEF) to explore sex differences in relation to treatment outcomes, type of Tuberculosis, comorbidities and related deaths. with Tuberculosis. The results will be discussed in workshops with National Tuberculosis Control Program staff, and in a course on masculinities and health aimed at National Tuberculosis Control Program staff.