Research Grants Pave Way for Columbian College Discoveries

July 10, 2014
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From scientific investigations on the origins of diabetes and the climate consequences of melting Arctic ice, to historical perspectives on the Ottoman Empire and D.C.’s African-American cultural legacy, to research projects in Java, Uganda and outer space, it’s been a banner year for major new research grants at Columbian College. Topping the list of grants received during fiscal year 2014 was a $14.6 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to a team led by Akos Vertes (chemistry) to develop a method that will rapidly identify the root of biological and chemical threats. The following are among the college’s other major grants* awarded during fiscal year 2014 (July 1, 2013—June 30, 2014):  

Africana Studies Program (and GW Libraries): $496,000 from the Council on Library and Informational Resources to establish the D.C. Africana Archives Project

Lynne E. Bernstein (speech and hearing science): $305,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study speech perception impairments in healthy normal-hearing adults

Charlene Bickford (history): $125,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to help continue the research of the First Federal Congress Project

Christopher Brick (history): $187,500 from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission to continue the work of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

Michael Döring (physics): $335,000 from Jefferson Science Associates LLC for collaborations with theory groups at Jefferson Lab to research the structure of matter

Ann Doucette (The Evaluators' Institute): $100,000 from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration for research on countermeasures to reduce suicides on railway rights-of-way

Evangeline Downie (physics): $285,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore nucleon with electromagnetic probes; and a $283,000 NSF grant for the International Research Experience for Students, a program that allows U.S. students to work with international physicists in the Mainz Microtron lab at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany

Susan Dudley (public administration): $220,000 from the European Commission to support her work with the Transatlantic Regulatory Commission

Gerald Feldman (physics): $162,000 from NSF for investigating ways to overcome challenges in algebra-based studio physics

Feifang Hu (statistics): $109,000 from NSF for work on discovering new statistical designs and their properties based upon covariate information

Aleksandar Jeremic (biological sciences): $1.3 million from NIH and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to examine the role of the human pancreatic hormone in the development of type 2 diabetes

Oleg Kargaltsev (physics): $37,000 from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to analyze the “Cheshire Cat’s Grin” paradox, a quantum physics phenomenon

Dina Khoury (history): $100,000 from NEH to examine aspects of citizenship in the late Ottoman and Russian Empires

Joel Kuipers (anthropology): $208,000 from NSF for a comparative study of Arabic language use in three communities on the Indonesian island of Java

Ganhui Lan (physics): $38,000 from the National Cancer Institute for research on collective cell behaviors in crowded two-dimensional space

Michael Larsen (statistics): $155,000 from the U.S. Census Bureau to examine the design and estimation methodology in the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Hua Liang (statistics): $63,000 from NSF for using generalized partially additive models to study high-dimensional data

Stuart Licht (chemistry): $144,000 from the Office of Naval Research for STEP (solar thermal electrochemical photo) generation of sustainable fuels and feedstock with carbon conversion, and $89,000 from Lynntech Inc. to develop high energy density VB2/air batteries for long endurance UAVs

Shannon McFarlin (anthropology): $34,000 from The Wenner-Gren Foundation for studying postnatal ontogeny of wild gorillas as it relates to fossil human life histories

Houston Miller (chemistry): $980,000 from NASA as part of a team project with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to study the role of thawing permafrost on carbon emissions and climate change

Mehdi Moini (forensic sciences): $222,000 from NSF for work on dating museum specimens by their proteins and deterioration markers

Leigh Phillips (psychology): $50,000 from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Foundation for developing a tool to improve detection and diagnosis of patients' non-adherence to Type II diabetes medications

Xiaofeng Ren (mathematics): $150,000 from NSF to investigate structured patterns that arise in many physical and biological systems as orderly outcomes of self-organization principles

Yongwu Rong (mathematics): $600,000 from NSF for the EXTREEMS-QED program, which educates undergraduate math and statistics students in data-enabled science and engineering

Frank Sesno (Media and Public Affairs): $50,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for media projects on climate change, global food security and the nation’s food system

Nikolay Shiklomanov (geography): $1.3 million from NSF in support of a long-term project to observe the effects and consequences of thawing Arctic permafrost

Stephen Smith (economics): $700,000 from the U.S. Agency for International Development to study the effects of scaling up international economic development in Senegal and Uganda

Adelina Voutchkova-Kostal (chemistry): $324,000 from NSF and the Environmental Protection Agency to develop tools that help molecule designers predict toxic hazards when evaluating new and existing chemicals

Victor Weedn (forensic sciences): $525,000 from PerkinElmer Health Sciences, Inc., for research on the use of mass spectrometry to characterize forensic specimens

*Dollar figures are rounded to the nearest thousand.