Category: Kudos

Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History, has been awarded the inaugural John Stuart Mill Faculty Fellowship from the Heterodox Academy (HxA). Prof. Khalid’s year-long fellowship will enable her to give her undivided attention to issues that she is passionate about and that align with the mission of HxA: increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in higher education.

Melanie Freeze, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, was awarded a Project Pericles “Up to Us Voting Modules” mini-grant to incorporate “How to Vote” civic engagement in her fall 2020 ACE course Polarization, Parties, and Power. Students completed voting plans and participated in voting outreach to elementary students and others in the community. The grant will also fund a political psychology class research project during the Spring 2021 term that examines people’s response to public health messaging from Republican and Democrat governors, with a focus on vaccinations.

Ryan Terrien, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, is the recipient of an NSF award for his project “Collaborative Research: An Agile Electro-Optic Frequency Comb for Precision Near-Infrared Radial Velocity Spectroscopy with the Habitable Zone Planet Finder.” As part of collaborative research with partners at UC Boulder, U Arizona, Pennsylvania State U, the team will upgrade the Habitable Zone Planet Finder spectrograph with new functionality and improved performance that will accelerate US exoplanet science and astrophysics and demonstrate technology for the future generation of astronomical instruments.

Barbara Allen, James Woodward Strong Professor of Political Science and the Liberal Arts, has been named a Fulbright Scholar. As a Scholar at the University of Luxembourg (UL), Prof. Allen will work as a public diplomat to advance international understanding and cooperation. At UL, in addition to giving public lectures, she will teach courses on political theorists Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, and on comparative political communication.

Susannah Ottaway, Professor of History, will contribute to work funded by the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants, titled “Developing an Irish Castle in Virtual Reality.” With Thomas Herron at East Carolina University, the team will design and test teaching modules built in virtual reality for an existing 3-D digital model of Kilcolman Castle, Ireland, home of English poet Edmund Spencer.

Rika Anderson, Assistant Professor of Biology, was awarded a Global Fellowship from the University of St. Andrews, which enables scholars to work within the academic community at St. Andrews. She will work in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences on projects related to the early evolution of microbial metabolisms on Earth.

Dani Kohen, Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant (#1900590) for a three-year project entitled “RUI: Molecular Insight into Cation Motion within Zeolites.” NSF funding will enable Prof. Kohen and her team of undergraduate researchers to conduct an in-depth computational study of the design and identification of zeolites – porous minerals commonly used as commercial adsorbents and catalysts – in a variety of industrial processes.

Gao Hong, Director of the Chinese Music Ensemble and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Musical Instruments, was awarded a 2019-20 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Musicians. Only four musicians out of 79 applying received the fellowship. Gao became the first musician in any genre to win five McKnight Artist Fellowships for Performing Musicians administered by the MacPhail Center for Music. See the 2019-2020 McKnight Fellowship Recipient Press Release.

Rou-Jia Sung, Assistant Professor of Biology, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant (#1841992) for her project, “Development of Novel Augmented Reality Tool for Teaching Molecular Visualization in Biochemistry.” Prof. Sung will work with coPI Dr. Andrew Wilson, Academic Technologist for Digital Scholarship, to develop a freely available AR-based application that can be installed on mobile smartphone and tablet devices and will contain virtual 3D objects representing the molecular structures of three fundamental molecules central to biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics curricula. Each molecule will be associated with a set of learning materials, developed by the project team, to facilitate use in the classroom. The three-year project involves 5 Carleton undergraduate researchers, Prof. Jane Liu at Pomona, and Prof. Thom Bussey and a graduate student at UCSD. Prof. Sung’s and Dr. Wilson’s application was recently covered the magazine The Scientist, which published a short article on its development and use so far.

Ryan Terrien, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, received a contract from NASA in March 2018 to serve as a co-investigator on a project to develop a new exoplanet-finding spectrograph. The spectrograph, called “NEID,” will detect exoplanets by measuring their minute gravitational tugs on their host stars. During summer 2018, Prof. Terrien will work with collaborators from Penn State, the University of Arizona, and other institutions to develop and commission new software and calibration systems for NEID, working towards a goal of commissioning the full spectrograph at the WIYN Telescope (Kitt Peak Observatory, AZ) in 2019.