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 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.

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 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.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto Awarded Prestigious Howard Foundation Fellowship

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto was awarded a highly-competitive Howard Foundation Fellowship in April 2017 for her project titled: Emancipation and Commerce: The Gambia Colony and American Plantations in the Age of British Abolition. The $33,000 fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year will support Dr. Gijanto’s research which examines the nature of the impact of the Atlantic trade on the Gambia River. Dr. Gijanto was one of just eight nationwide 2017-2018 fellowship recipients and the only recipient in the field of archaeology. Other 2017-2018 fellowship recipients were selected from the fields of photography and anthropology and range from professors at large institutions such as UCLA to independent artists collaborating with organizations such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This distinguished award will allow Dr. Gijanto to complete data-gathering for the Emancipation and Commerce project and begin writing a monograph describing the work. The project will advance understanding of the complex history of abolition in West Africa, a program that was ironically undermined by the continued consumption of goods produced by enslaved laborers in the Americas within an African colony founded to end the traffic of slaves. Dr. Gijanto will travel to two archives: the Peter Strickland Archive in Mystic, Connecticut and the British National Archives in Kew, London, during Fall 2017 and begin work on the monograph in Spring 2018.

The Howard Foundation is associated with Brown University and is one of few funders dedicated “to furthering the personal development of promising individuals at the crucial middle stages of their careers in the liberal and creative arts”. The Howard Foundation awards a limited number of fellowships each year for independent projects in selected fields, targeting its support specifically to early mid-career individuals and those who have achieved recognition for at least one major project.

Assistant Professor Kristy A. Lewis’ Collaborative Research Project Investigates Community and Ecological Impacts after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Kristy A. Lewis, Assistant Professor of Coastal Ecology

Kristy A. Lewis, Assistant Professor of Coastal Ecology at SMCM, received highly competitive funding from a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Gulf Research Program Synthesis Grant to participate in a collaborative project titled: Community Cohesion and Recovery after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. The work is crucial to disaster management as it examines a community’s ability to self-organize and mobilize after a major disruption such as the oil spill occurring in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Dr. Lewis’ two-year $77,000 award is part of a larger overall NAS award ($590,000; NAS Award # 200007629) directed by principal investigator Dr. So-Min Cheong at the University of Kansas Center for Research. Dr. Lewis will be the key personnel driving the ecological analyses while also working closely with collaborator Jacob Model of Stanford University to develop a comprehensive database of social and ecological data, called the Community Response Inventory (CRI). Dr. Lewis and collaborators will then develop statistical models to assess the association between the presence of local nonprofits, density of those networks, and how the ecological health of the system drives the ability of nonprofits, and thus communities, to respond to oil spills.

Specifically, the planned research uses environmental data in combination with community-level social and economic data to generate novel insights on community impact from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It fills an important gap in social capital and community resilience literature by bringing attention to organizations and nonprofits, and helps develop community skills to mobilize and coordinate. This project will also provide funding for an undergraduate research assistant at SMCM to support Dr. Lewis with her research. Dr. Lewis transitioned from a visiting assistant professor position to a tenure-track assistant professor position in July 2017 and will continue this research into 2018.

Research reported in this article was supported by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number: 200007629.

Julia A. King Awarded Funding to Host Book-Preparation Conference

Stratford Hall Conference Attendees

Dr. Julia A. King (far right) and collaborators including SMCM alumni Strickland ’08 (back row third from right), Mansius ’13 (front row third from right), and Webster ’16 (front row second from right)

Julia A. King, Professor of Anthropology, recently received a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Dr. King received $4,000 from the NEH Chairman’s office to help fund a small two-day conference in May 2017 which brought together participants from a previous NEH-funded Collaborative Research Grant entitled: The Lower Potomac River Valley at Contact (ca. 1500-1720 AD). The conference provided an opportunity for collaborators to review, critique, and better integrate individual essays for a peer-reviewed manuscript with a hopeful submission date in September 2017. The book will describe the archaeological research focused on the history and development of the lower Potomac River valley before the age of George Washington. Dr. Barbara J. Heath, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, will serve as co-editor along with Dr. King.  The conference was held at Stratford Hall, a historic house museum in Westmoreland County, Virginia and was additionally supported by the SMCM Provost’s office.

The book will consist of 14-15 chapters by different authors, all of whom participated in the original project which began in 2012. Collaborators, staff, and consultants assembled collections from 34 previously-excavated archaeological sites on both sides of the Potomac and used these assemblages to address three major topics related to Anglo-Native interaction: economic exchange and the rise of consumerism; the role of conflict, violence, and the threat of violence in the competition for resources; and the use of material culture to maintain or broker new or hybrid identities in a colonial setting. The project has resulted in several peer-reviewed articles, symposia at professional meetings, and the website colonialencounters.org. SMCM alumni Scott M. Strickland ’08, Mary Kate Mansius ’13, and Rebecca Webster ’16 attended the conference as participants and are preparing chapters for the book.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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