Grant News

Nathan Grawe (Economics) will serve as the director of Carleton’s Quantitative Reasoning, Inquiry, and Knowledge (QuIRK) program, which is supported by two recently-received grants. In September 2007, Carleton was awarded a $499,994 National Science Foundation (NSF) CCLI Phase 2 grant to use the writing-based assessment of student quantitative reasoning improvements to guide and evaluate curricular reform. With advice from representatives from six other institutions and following the completion of feasibility studies at four partner colleges and universities, Carleton will adapt its assessment/professional development model for dissemination to two- and four-year colleges and universities. In late 2007, the Keck Foundation granted $300,000 to Carleton to extend QR teaching and learning into fields and departments where quantitative skills and data are less commonly used. Modeled after and integrated with the College’s well-established Writing Program, QuIRK’s professional development workshops and curricular revisions flow from assessment of QR in student writing samples using QuIRK’s novel rubric. The focus on student writing and integration with the Writing Program has allowed QuIRK to implement reforms rapidly and to engage faculty with broad disciplinary representation

These two grants will enable the QuIRK initiative to raise awareness of quantitative reasoning around campus (through LTC talks, workshops to assess QR proficiency in student writing, and other means), to share best QR-teaching practices among faculty throughout the College, and to support curricular reform by funding course development and revision. Read more on recent grants.

In late 2007, Steven Drew (Chemistry) was awarded an Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) grant in the amount of $2,840 to develop skills necessary for increasing his proficiency with the theory and practical application of X-ray crystallography. The funds allow Professor Drew to attend the Crystallography Summer School at the University of California, San Diego during the summer of 2008. Read more on recent grants.

The Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) awarded a Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) grant to Jamie Monson (History) in the amount of $3,000. The funds support enrollment in an intensive Chinese language and cultural studies program in Beijing, offered by CET Academic Programs in June and July 2008. Her current research project – a study of a Tanzanian railway project that was built with Chinese development assistance in the 1960s and 1970s – requires her to acquire language skills in Mandarin Chinese and deepen her understanding of Chinese history and culture. Read more on recent grants.

Nicola Melville (Music) was the recipient of a $5,200 Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund award. The grant supported the later phases of a project that has culminated in a CD “Melville’s Dozen” of new piano music in various styles – jazz, funk, Appalachian, Andean, tango, et cetera – that build bridges to different kinds of audience, including high school and college piano students. This grant, along with one from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council, have helped with the cost of commissioning the thirteen included pieces from well-known composers, premiering it at a concert here at Carleton last year, recording the music, and manufacturing the CD. Read more on recent grants.

Gao Hong Dice (Music) was chosen to receive The “St. Paul Listens” grant from the American Composer Forum with award amount of $6,000. This program will commission her to write a work to be performed and recorded by Zeitgeist that will engage children and adults in listening to a new musical work. Gao Hong is the one of the first three composers to be selected for this new project. Read more on recent grants.

In September, Susan Singer (Biology) received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award of $200,000 for a collaborative project with coPIs from Cornell University and the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR). Their research “Big Science at Small Schools Collaboration: Genomics of Chamaecrista fasciculata, a native prairie plant with potential for mixed prairie biomass” will bring new-generation sequencing technology and the opportunity to work with whole transcriptome sequences to an undergraduate collaborative, and will generate an educational module accessible to high school teachers. Read more on recent grants.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a three-year grant of $220,156 to David Liben-Nowell (Computer Science). His Theoretical Foundations project, “Algorithms for Social Networks,” has two main threads: the investigation of formal mathematical models and systematic analysis of large-scale real–world social networks. Prof. Liben-Nowell’s research (and that of the students who will be funded by the grant) will use well-known online communities to better understand the general characteristics of networks. Read more on recent grants.

The Science Education Resource Center (SERC), directed by Cathy Manduca, received a National Science Foundation (NSF) REC award of $61,039 for a collaborative project with Columbia University titled “Synthesis of Research on Thinking and Learning in the Geosciences.” Read more on recent grants.

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research was awarded to Joseph Chihade (Chemistry). These additional funds to an AREA grant support an African American female biology major to participate in his work exploring the evolution and specificity of an important enzyme family, with implications for antibiotic development and insight into several inheritable mitochondrial diseases. Read more on recent grants.

Sarah Titus (Geology) received an American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund Type G grant to investigate distributed deformation within the San Andreas Fault in central California. Read more on recent grants.