Tags » Faculty Grants

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.

Leticia Arroyo Abad (Economics), with co-coordinators at Denison, Scripps, Furman, and Williams, has received funding through the AALAC Mellon 23 Collaborative Workshop program for a workshop titled Change and Continuity: Economic History in the Liberal Arts Context, to be held in April 2013 at Denison University. The workshop builds on past efforts and will focus more explicitly on research and teaching in economic history, while continuing to explore the close relationship that economic history has to many fields within economics.

Will Pyle (Economics) has been selected to participate in the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad program for Summer 2013. The award covers all expenses for the four week seminar titled, Social Sciences in China. During the course of visiting four cities, the seminar will examine China’s economic system and growth, political and legal systems, and social and demographic changes. Will intends to use the experience to help boost the China-related content in his elective courses and, specifically, to learn more about urban land issues.

John Schmitt (Mathematics), with colleagues from Dartmouth College, Bard College, Haverford College, St. Michael’s College, SUNY Albany, Wesleyan University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has received funding for a series of four conferences on discrete mathematics to be held at various locations in the Northeast over the next two years. The first was hosted by Middlebury at Bread Loaf during September. The main purposes of these conferences are to enhance the national infrastructure for research and education in discrete mathematics by creating and strengthening a regional network of interacting researchers and to facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge research ideas, methods and results.