Erick Gong (Economics) and a colleague from the International Food Policy Institute have received funding from IFPRI and a program for alumni of the Hewlett Dissertation Fellowships program for a two-year research project in Kenya titled Can Savings Accounts Save Lives? Financial products for improving sexual and reproductive health. The goal of this project is to see if providing women with financial independence in the form of mobile phone savings accounts can help them better manage risk in their daily lives.

Susan Watson (Physics) has been awarded supplemental funding from the National Science Foundation to cover travel expenses to Denmark for her and two students for each of the next two years. While at the University of Copenhagen, where her main collaborator has relocated, she and her students will continue the quantum physics research funded by the original grant. In addition, the supplemental funding will cover costs for these students to be trained at the National Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard.

Jeff Howarth (Geography) and Jeanne Albert (Center for Teaching, Learning & Research) have each received a small grant to develop a blended approach to courses they’re scheduled to teach this coming year: GEOG 0120 -  Fundamental of GIS and MATH 0100 – A World of Mathematics. These grants are part of the Next Generation Learning Challenges Wave 1 grant initiative based at Bryn Mawr College. The purpose of this initiative is to integrate open source courseware modules available through the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (CMU OLI) into traditional classroom-based STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses within a liberal arts college setting to enhance student engagement as a means of improving course completion, persistence in the science/math major, and college completion.

Pete Ryan (Geology) has been awarded a grant through the National Science Foundation’s RUI mechanism to research rates and mechanisms of mineral reactions and associated chemical changes that occur as tropical soils mature. The project, titled Landscape-scale Implications of Mineral Reaction Rates and Mechanisms in Tropical Soils: Insights from Soil Chronosequences and Synthesis Experiments, involves field work in Costa Rica during the first year, with one Middlebury undergraduate and collaborators from the University of Costa Rica, followed by lab and analytical work with collaborators at IACT in Granada, Spain that will involve one Middlebury undergraduate and a student from the University of Costa Rica. Over the next two years, four additional undergraduates will work on this project at Middlebury.