Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP)

Assisting faculty and staff to engage in research and scholarly & creative endeavors

Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) / Archives for Current Sponsored Research

Angela Johnson awarded grant to study women of color in STEM

Angela C Johnson, professor and department chair of Educational Studies, is interested in the challenges that women of color face in physics, math, computer science, and other similar fields. In preliminary research, Dr. Johnson has found that St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) may be on the right track in supporting these historically underrepresented students.

Johnson recently finalized a subaward agreement to serve as co-principal investigator on an NSF-funded project titled: Centering Women of Color in STEM: Identifying and Scaling Up What Helps Women of Color Thrive. Dr. Johnson is partnering with Dr. Apriel K Hodari of Eureka Scientific, Inc. on the project which will use data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to compare the inclusivity and success of women of color across college campuses.

Johnson will co-lead the overall project, manage the quantitative data collection, and contribute to data collection, coding, and analysis, and report production. Two SMCM students, Rose Young and Elizabeth Mulvey, will assist with data collection, including conducting interviews with women of color in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Ultimately, the researchers hope to provide information to help guide organizations committed to creating supportive environments for women of color to thrive in STEM fields. The two-year project is scheduled to run through the summer of 2019.

SMCM students attending the 2018 National Conference on Undergraduate Research

In April 2018, students, faculty, and academics alike will travel to the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, OK for a very special event. The National Conference on Undergraduate Research  (NCUR), annually invites accepted students to present their undergraduate research from a variety of disciplines. After a competitive review, three St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) students have been awarded the opportunity to share their research and academic achievements at NCUR 2018.  

One of these successful students is Hannah Murphy, a graduating senior studying Spanish. She has been conducting research on increasing the retention of critical thinking skills in students that speak English as a second language. Using local middle school students as her focus, she hopes to develop critical thinking skills using articles in the students’ native language, and show that those skills transfer over when students use English. She will assess students critical thinking skills before and after relevant articles are read in the native language and will share her results at the NCUR conference. Hannah hopes to promote the importance of native languages and how they can be used to better the students educational experience, instead of hindering it.

Sidi Chleuh working on Fulbe linguistic research

Another notable student is Sidi Chleuh, a senior here at SMCM. He is studying International Languages and Cultures, with a double concentration in French and Spanish. He will be presenting his research on Fulbe oral literature at NCUR. The Fulbe are an ethno-linguistic group located in West Africa and have had their linguistic culture influenced by the spread of Islam and colonization. Sidi hopes to revive the importance of the Fulbe language and show how Fulbe proverbs impact culture throughout time. Sidi has conducted much of his fieldwork in the Republic of Guinea, collecting notes on the Fulbe language from the former colonial administration records, as well as past anthropological work. He will present his findings and showcase how Fulbe proverbs impact local identity, as well as influence values and knowledge. Sidi conducted much of this research in the summer of 2017, as part of the St. Mary’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship program. After graduation, Sidi hopes to continue travelling and to share his passion for languages as he contemplates future education. 

Chikondi Kulemeka is researching female Muslim identity in France

Also going to NCUR is Chikondi Kulemeka, presenting ‘Beyond the Veil: Exploring the Many Layers of Muslim Women’s Identity in Nice, France’. Seeing the rising rate of Islamophobia in Europe, Chikondi has researched the daily life of Muslim women in France. She focuses her research on one woman particularly. This woman was born in Morocco, but grew up in France and is currently attending Nice University. Chikondi used this woman as a main focus of her interviews and research, helping to describe the bigger picture of the female Muslim experience in France as a whole. This research can show the opinions and experience of these individuals during their daily life. Through interviews and a detailed literature review, she hopes to shed light on the unique perspectives that these female Muslim individuals have as they navigate through their layered identities.

Past SMCM students presenting their work at NCUR have included Elizabeth Wenker ’17 and Brad Davidson’s ’17 research with white-crowned sparrows in Dr. Malisch’s lab (NCUR 2017) and Alex Schoen ’17 and Mary Korendyke’s mathematical modeling research with Dr. Socha (NCUR 2016).

 

 

 

First Annual SMCM Research Forum held Jan 12, 2018

Audience members including (left-to-right): SMCM faculty James Mantel, Torry Dennis, and Amanda VerMeulen

St. Mary’s College of Maryland held the first Annual Research Forum on January 12th 2018 in the beautiful Blackistone Room in Anne Arundel Hall. The goals of the multi-disciplinary forum were to: offer both general advice for faculty and staff seeking external funding and specific feedback for those with developed project ideas, to provide a venue for intentional networking with external guests and among existing colleagues, and to celebrate active awards and recent efforts to secure external funding.

 

The day’s events included:

  • Panel Discussion: Writing More Competitive Grant Proposals: Tom Wenzel, professor of chemistry and grant writing consultant, and SMCM faculty-scholars (Drs. Bailey, Deane-Coe, Grossman, Neiles);
  • Lunch Buffet & Networking: Featuring external guests representing the Maryland State Arts Council, St. Mary’s County Arts Council, National Park Service and Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units Network, Conservation Branch of Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) at Patuxent River, Naval Air Warfare Center- Aircraft Division at Patuxent River, and Southern Maryland Higher Education Center;
  • Panel Discussion: Securing External Funding in the Humanities and Arts: Christine Kalke, NEH Senior Analyst and International Coordinator (retired), Amy Stolls NEA Director of Literature, and SMCM faculty-scholars (Drs. Başaran, Brodsky, Gabriel, King, Wooley);
  • Individual Consultation Sessions: Review and expert feedback on grant proposals with Dr. Tom Wenzel, Dr. Christine Kalke, and Amy Stolls;
  • Wine & Cheese Reception: Open to all faculty, in recognition and celebration of active awards and recent efforts to secure external funding, with remarks from Provost Wick; co-sponsored by the Offices of the Provost and Institutional Advancement.

The forum was well attended, with active discussions continuing throughout the day. The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs plans to hold annual research forums in support of faculty and staff scholarship. If you have ideas about future topics of interest, please contact Dr. Sabine Dillingham at x4192, sldillingham@smcm.edu.

Provost Wick delivers remarks during the forum reception

Marilyn Steyert and Max Madden awarded funding for SMP research

Two students conducting their St. Mary’s Project research with Dr. Aileen Bailey, professor of psychology and Aldom-Planseon Honors College Professor, have received grants to support their work. Marilyn Steyert was recently awarded a $918 grant through the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society to support her research and in recognition of her academic achievement. A graduating senior, Marilyn is majoring in Biology, with minors in Neuroscience and Music. She is continuing past research on the project entitled “Understanding the action of novel fast-acting antidepressant, L-655,708 in the brain” under the guidance of Dr. Bailey. Another student working on research in Dr. Bailey’s lab is graduating senior Max Madden, a double major in Biochemistry and Psychology. He has received $1,500 in funding through the Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Grant to support his St. Mary’s Project: “Examination of the Mechanism of the Fast Acting Antidepressant L-655,708.” Since July 2015, Dr. Bailey’s research lab has been primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health, via a subaward with University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Using rats as test subjects, Marilyn and Max are analyzing the effects of a specific drug on synapse strength within neurons in certain areas of the brain. The grant money received from Sigma Xi is being used to visualize and study certain proteins within cells. Changes in behavior and synaptic strength will be analyzed to see the effects of L-655,708 in the rats brain. Marilyn hopes to show the potential of this drug for future use in humans, due to its rapid neurological changes in rats. As with all research conducted on vertebrate animals at St. Mary’s College, Marilyn and Max’s work was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Marilyn is the President of Tri Beta, the Biological Honor Society at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and is also involved in BioPump, a program that supports Biology students’ academic success. After graduation, Marilyn hopes to continue her academic education and become a professor. Max was a member of the St. Mary’s men’s Swim Team and plans to continue his education in graduate school after leaving St. Mary’s College. Marilyn and Max are two of many talented students to receive a grant through an honor society here at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Katharina von Kellenbach to lead study of guilt as a culturally productive force

Katharina von Kellenbach, professor of religious studies and her colleague Matthias Buschmeier (German literature, University of Bielefeld) were awarded a prestigious grant for over €500,000 (about $600,000) by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) at the University of Bielefeld for the 2018-2019 academic year.

She and Dr. Buschmeier will lead 15 scholars from different continents representing the disciplines of anthropology, art, classics, law, medieval studies, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, and sociology to examine the idea of guilt as an enduring and generative force in the aftermath of violent conflicts.

Titled “Felix Culpa? Guilt as a Culturally Productive Force,” the research group will be in residence at the ZIF in Bielefeld to exchange theoretical perspectives on the notion of ‘productive guilt’ and to pursue individual projects examining a variety of topics ranging from white guilt in the United States to the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, from religious healing rituals in Mozambique to the reception of Syrian refugees in Germany as negotiation of different kinds of guilt.
The project closely examines the intersections of violence, shame, and guilt to ask how guilt consolidates social orders in the cultural production of jurisprudence, art, literature, and religion. Each scholar pursues their own research project while engaging in collaborative discussion across disciplines and different religious, cultural, and linguistic contexts to explore the wealth of symbolic representations and discourses of guilt.

St. Mary’s College Participates in Council on Undergraduate Research Transformations Project

Pamela Mertz, Professor of Chemistry and CBC Chair, with St. Mary’s College students

The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Transformations Project will kick off this weekend, October 27-29, at The College of New Jersey, where the CUR-recruited consultants and departmental teams will begin their sustained work together for the next four years. Attending the meeting on behalf of St. Mary’s College is administrative co-lead of the project, Christine Wooley, interim associate dean of curriculum,  and departmental co-leads Aileen Bailey, Pamela Mertz, and Kelly Neiles.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is one of only 12 institutions selected by CUR for its Transformations Project, funded by the National Science Foundation. The Transformations Project will revise traditional four-year undergraduate curricula in biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology by focusing on high-quality undergraduate research throughout the four years of a student’s major. Participants from institutions around the country will directly engage in novel research to study the student, faculty, departmental, and disciplinary influences on the process of integrating and scaffolding undergraduate research experiences throughout the curriculum in two of the four possible disciplines.

A team of 16 faculty and staff members at St. Mary’s College are participating, including principal investigator and co-lead Sabine Loew Dillingham, director of the office of research & sponsored programs.

The full team is comprised of:

  • Michael Wick, provost and dean of faculty
  • Anne Marie Himmelheber Brady, director of the office of institutional research
  • Pamela Mertz, CBC’s chair & professor of chemistry
  • Kelly Neiles, assistant professor of chemistry
  • Andrew Koch, professor of chemistry
  • Randolph Larsen, professor of chemistry
  • Daniel Chase, assistant professor of chemistry
  • Geoffrey Bowers, assistant professor of chemistry
  • Aileen Bailey, Aldom-Planseon Honors College Professor of psychology
  • Nathaniel Foster, assistant professor of psychology
  • Cynthia Koenig, associate professor of psychology
  • James Mantell, assistant professor of psychology
  • Jennifer Tickle, associate professor of psychology
  • Elizabeth Nutt Williams, professor of psychology & chair of the psychology department
  • Christine Wooley, interim associate dean of curriculum
  • Sabine Loew Dillingham, director of the office of research & sponsored programs

SMCM Title IX Coordinator Michael Dunn Awarded Grant from the Maryland Department of Health

Michael Dunn, SMCM Title IX Coordinator

Michael Dunn, SMCM’s Director of Title IX Compliance and Training/Title IX Coordinator, was recently awarded funding from the Center for Injury and Sexual Assault Prevention at the Maryland Department of Health as part of a competitive application process. The funding comes from the Maryland Rape and Sexual Assault Prevention College Initiative which seeks to enhance campus-based sexual violence prevention activities.

SMCM will use the $8,000 grant to partner with the national violence prevention organization, A Call to Men, to offer a series of workshops on campus during the fall 2017 semester. Trained advisors from A Call to Men will lead multiple workshops on two occasions during the fall semester – aimed in particular at male members of the community – to address the prevalence, impact, prevention, and rejection of sexual violence on campus. All students, faculty, and staff will be invited and encouraged to attend. The Title IX Coordinator and the Implementation Team’s goal is to include preexisting communities of men on campus – athletic, academic, social, etc. – and to create a welcoming environment for any other individuals interested in attending. The focus on educating men is a result of College and national data that indicate that the majority of sexual misconduct incidents are committed by males. In addition, community partners through the St. Mary’s County Sexual Assault Response Team, including advocacy groups, medical responders, and law enforcement personnel, will be invited to attend.

The Title IX Coordinator and the Implementation Team will lead follow-up events on campus and will engage in an ongoing messaging campaign to reinforce and build on the training materials shared at the workshops. This important award from the Maryland Department of Health will help increase sexual violence prevention activities that are grounded in the best available evidence and utilize the principles of effective prevention.

SMCM Professor of Chinese Jingqi Fu Awarded Major Language Documentation Project Grant

Dr. Jingqi Fu, SMCM Professor of Chinese, in Yunnan Province, Summer 2016

Dr. Jingqi Fu, Professor of Chinese at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, was awarded funding in April 2017 from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme through SOAS, University of London for her project titled: Documentation and Preservation of an Endangered Ethnic Minority Language in China. Fu will travel to China extensively over the next three years to document the Lemo language that, to date, has no written script. “Lemo is the oldest dialect of Bai and is known to have separated from the Bai some 300-400 years ago,” explains Fu. “Its study will give clues as to the evolution of the Bai language as a whole.”

Dr. Fu’s linguistic research interests carry on work conducted by her mother, Lin Xu, who spoke the ethnic minority language of Bai during her childhood. Fu’s linguistic knowledge of the Bai dialect and structure, learned alongside her mother, provides a framework for the documentation effort she will lead as principal investigator on the three-year grant.

The research goal is both a linguistic study of the Lemo dialect and an enhancement of the status of Lemo language and culture. According to Fu, the Chinese government wants to document the culture by way of costumes in a museum but is not trying to keep the culture (and language) alive. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme “supports keeping endangered languages alive and emphasizes that their documentation should be done in natural, everyday settings and situations, to best characterize the language and its cultural role” Fu remarks. All recordings will be archived in the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS and thereby preserved for posterity. The archive makes this invaluable resource available to the community, the public, and to the scientific community.

Fu spent three weeks in China during the summer of 2016 to prepare for the project, with the work beginning in earnest in summer 2017. A second summer in 2018, followed by a five-month stretch during spring 2019, will bring the project to completion.

Fu is principal investigator but will enlist a team to help with the research and data gathering. Representatives from the Yunnan Nationality Affair Commission and Dali Bai Research Institute, plus a technician and speaker-consultants recruited from the Lemo Community in Nujiang will form the research team.

The first two weeks in Nujiang will be spent making contacts with relevant people and conducting a week-long workshop on language documentation for speaker-consultants to learn to document their own language and culture. Afterwards, team members, equipped with recorders and cameras will gather data in different Lemo-speaking villages. Members will film and record in a variety of settings and contexts: story-telling, interviews, folksongs and dances, speeches, everyday situations, and, if permitted, religious ceremonies.

Once audio/video is captured, researchers and speaker-consultants will work to transcribe the data using open source software developed to annotate text, audio, and video media and generate the lexicon/dictionary of the language. In addition to the dictionary, the team will also build a grammar sketch. Both the dictionary and grammar sketch use data generated from the recorded audio/video. A working orthography (the way a language is expressed in written form, with symbols, punctuation, spelling) will be developed together with the Lemo community and a short language manual will be made based on the orthography. The manual, intended for first-grade children, will include cultural material relevant to their living environment.

Fu is grateful for the support she’s received to get this research funded. A summer grant from the St. Mary’s College Board of Trustees enabled her to travel to China this past summer in preparation for the work she’ll do under the current grant.

Fu has taken SMCM students on study tours to study and interact with Yunnan minority groups including Bai, as recently as 2015. In 2014, her students Megan Dower ’14, Naomi Garcia ’15, and Meng Fei Chen ’16 helped with the research on folksong translations.

Professor of Anthropology Julia King Awarded $240,000 Grant for Native American Study

Dr. Julia King (third from left), collaborators, and project participants

St. Mary’s College of Maryland Professor of Anthropology Julia King was awarded a $240,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to trace the history and development of the Rappahannock Indians in early American history (200-1850 AD) in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR), Chesapeake Conservancy, and the state-recognized Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia. The grant was one of 245 humanities projects from across the country awarded a combined $39.3 million from the NEH.

The anthropology department at St. Mary’s College first began studying the Rappahannock River Valley’s history in 2016 at the request of the National Park Service Chesapeake Bay office with funds administered by the Chesapeake Conservancy. The work was undertaken to provide interpretive support for the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail.

Conventional wisdom has long held that the Rappahannock Indians moved to the north side of the Rappahannock River to escape the politically powerful Powhatan Indians in the York River Valley. Research by the St. Mary’s College team, however, suggests that ecological factors, including agricultural soils, marshlands, and clays suitable for pottery manufacture, and not political factors, better explain the Rappahannock’s decisions about where to settle. This discovery, which was made using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology, revealed the need for further archaeological study of the river valley. The NEH grant will allow this study on these tribal groups to continue.

Professor of Anthropology Julia King leads the research team, comprised of anthropology instructor Scott Strickland, an assistant archaeologist, and two archaeology technicians (St. Mary’s College undergraduate students) who will assist with field and laboratory work. They are joined by Chief G. Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock Tribe, who, along with tribal members, will assist with the field and laboratory work.

The continuing study will focus on the trajectories of movement into and within the Rappahannock valley, how the Rappahannock people used landscape and other forms of material culture to forge group and/or political identities between 200 and 1600 CE, and the reaction of the people living in the river valley to European contact and colonization.

“Thanks to the NEH grant, we will be able to start addressing some of the recommendations from the original study we conducted in 2016,” King said. “We hope to assemble a detailed culture history for the Rappahannock Indians in the river valley over the last 2,000 years, including archaeological collections-based analysis and a regional survey.”

Chief Richardson notes that her tribe’s oral history recalls the Powhatan as neighbors with whom they shared winter hunting grounds. “The Rappahannock’s history has been overlooked in almost every history book. We are grateful to the NEH for recognizing this serious gap in American history and providing the resources for us to address it.”

This research tracing the history and development of the Rappahannock indigenous cultural landscape is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this press release, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education through 2024-2025. St. Mary’s College, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Approximately 1,700 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland.

SMCM’s Ellen Kohl Awarded Funding for March 2018 Conference at University of Louisville

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ellen Kohl

SMCM Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ellen Kohl and collaborators Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon and Tanisha Stanford at the University of Louisville were awarded funding in June 2017 from the Antipode Foundation to host a conference titled: Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters: The role of spirituality in African American Environmental Activism in the U.S. South. The conference will explore the complicated connections between spirituality and environmental activism among African Americans in the U.S. South.

Dr. Kohl and collaborators seek to address four key questions through the conference: 1) How does spirituality influence African American involvement in environmental activism? 2) What specific spiritual expressions do we see in African American environmentalism? 3) How do African Americans spiritual engagement with the environment helps us to expand our definition of spirituality more broadly? 4) How does an engagement with spirituality expand our understanding of what activism is? The conference will bring together scholars, activists, and faith leaders to expand the conversation beyond the confines of academia, incorporating the people who are engaging with questions of African American spirituality and the environment through their daily work.

The conference will be held at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky from Thursday, March 1 – Saturday, March 3, 2018. Participants will present papers during several thematic sessions, providing ample time for discussions to occur between the presenters and between the presenters and the audience. A portion of the conference sessions will be available via livestream on the conference website and the University website, with appropriate care given to providing a safe space for conference participants to discuss what may be deeply personal experiences with spiritualty and environmentalism. The final product for this conference will be an edited volume on race, spirituality, and environmental activism, co-edited by Dr. McCutcheon and Dr. Kohl, and ideally published in the University of Georgia Press’ Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series.

The Antipode Foundation is a UK registered charity that publishes Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, a peer-reviewed scientific journal released five times per year by Wiley-Blackwell, typically focusing on social justice issues.

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