GW Arts & Sciences Spring Update 2016

SPRING 2016

Dean’s Message AT COLUMBIAN COLLEGE, the essence of what marks our distinctiveness as an institution is our role as standard bearers of what we call the engaged liberal arts. Our students crave multi-faceted ways to analyze problems, to think creatively, to be challenged on the pressing issues of our time, and we deliver this through our curriculum, our student/faculty research experiences and our connections with the community.

The engaged liberal arts recognizes that we live in a global society that is enduring rapid and furious change, and it is incumbent upon us to develop the minds that will help engineer future change. In this update, you’ll learn how faculty and student researchers are using lasers and genetically engineered mice to bring peace of mind to schizophrenia sufferers. You’ll witness an astrophysicist become the first to ever document a black hole destroying a star millions of light years away. And you’ll accompany an architecture and design scholar on a mission to rescue the art of hand-sketching in a digital age.

COLUMBIAN

BY THE NUMBERS 494 full-time faculty 8,000+ students

Today, our daily lives are bombarded by information, but information is meaningless if we cannot produce knowledge from it. In 1651, a famous Jesuit priest, Jeronimo Nadal, was known for teaching others that “the world is our house.”

That has never been more true than it is now. As the caretakers of knowledge, as the bridge to engagement, we must instill in our students the importance of taking care of “our house” through the use and refinement of their minds.

Ben Vinson III Dean, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences

90 graduate programs 28 research centers/institutes $17.8 million in research expenditures

INSIDE

53 majors; 61 minors

2 The Art of Sketching 3 Running Against Gender Bias

4 Silencing Schizophrenia 5 Death by Black Hole

6 Bigger not Better for Early Humans 8 New Grants

AN UPDATE FROM THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY COLUMBIAN COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Stephanie Travis Photo: Zach Marin

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Interior Architecture and Design’s Stephanie Travis is restoring pen and paper to a digital age.

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’s the dirty secret of design in the digital age: Today’s architects spend many more hours laboring over computer screens than sketchbooks. Hand-drawings, the architect’s primary tool for expression since the Renaissance, have largely been replaced by digital renderings.

With sophisticated software like AutoCAD and Revit, designers can now instantly point and click their way to illustrations with photo-like precision. Indeed, in the face of a technology onslaught, sketching seems so perilously close to obsolete that the Yale School of Architecture hosted a symposium entitled “Is Drawing Dead?”

But ask Stephanie Travis, associate professor and director of the Interior Architecture and Design Program, and she’ll insist reports

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of drawing’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Step into her classrooms and studios, and you’ll find students clutching pens, markers and even crayons, scribbling design concepts on sketchpads.

“Students are always surprised at how much our curriculum emphasizes drawing,” she said. “But no matter what anyone tells you, sketching is still essential for developing the next generation of designers—and it always will be.”

Through her classes and her new book Sketching for Architecture + Interior Design (Laurence King Publishing, 2015), Travis is on a mission to revive the art of sketching and give students raised on computers the confidence to pick up a pen.

THE POWER OF PENCIL AND PAD Far from archaic, the ability to convey abstract design concepts with hand-drawn sketches is a vital part of the creative process. Not only does drawing hone budding designers’ skills and help them establish a personal style, but architectural and design firms still look for strong sketchers. Sketching, according to Travis, remains the most fluent and unhindered way to transmit a designer’s vision to the world—whether they are presenting rough draft ideas to their bosses or explaining concepts to their clients.

“There’s something about a pencil and pad that awakens your senses and expands the flow of creativity,” Travis said. “Sketching allows

Danny Hayes

Photo: Logan Werlinger

you to explore design objects more deeply, to see them more carefully. Sketchers have a visual dictionary in their head that’s as important to their career as anything they do on a computer.”

For Travis, pitting hand-drawings against computer-generated imagery is a misleading debate; an architect should have both skills in her toolbox. She doesn’t deny that computer drafting now dominates the professional design world for its ease, speed and perfect detail. “It saves time and money in an architect’s daily work. You would be crazy if you didn’t take advantage of the ability to make changes quickly rather than having to erase or redraw everything time and again.” Digital designs are also far easier to integrate with construction contractors, mechanical engineers and plumbers on large-scale projects. “I wouldn’t want to build a skyscraper based on a hand sketch,” Travis said.

Still, in introductory sketching classes she has taught, Travis has seen students who are extremely adept at creating computer imagery, but often lack confidence in their freehand talents. “This is a generation that has grown up with the computer,” she said.

“But their laptops are also a crutch. Many simply do not have basic sketching skills.”

For Ayelet Oser, MFA ’14, Travis’ technique of breaking down sketching steps into manageable pieces—from correctable pencil designs to pen drawings that reveal every misstep and change of course—encouraged Oser to refine her personal style. “That’s where I developed my sketching hand,” she said.

Interior Architecture and Design students are encouraged to view sketching as a tool for seeing; it’s a focused, deliberative process.

“The computer is fast. Sketching is slow. It makes you pause and scrutinize,“ explained Travis. “You cross things out and start over.

That takes more time to comprehend.” Or as Oser put it, “Stephanie Travis made it clear that it was OK to make mistakes.”

Oser is now a designer with the prestigious Washington, D.C., firm HapstakDemetriou.

Specializing in hospitality design, she creates concepts for restaurants, markets and hotels.

“It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted to do,” Oser said. How did she land the job? The firm was particularly impressed by her sketch-heavy portfolio, noting they hadn’t seen that skill-set in other candidates. “That made me smile and think about Stephanie,” she said.

Are Female Candidates Still Running Against Gender Bias?

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illary Clinton’s hairstyle. Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. When female candidates run for office, the electoral focus invariably seems to fall on their appearance rather than their ideas and qualifications. It’s a long-standing assumption that women battle fierce gender bias on the campaign trail— from the media, their opponents and even the voters themselves.

But what if that assumption is inaccurate? What if the real hindrance to a woman’s road to the White House isn’t as much gender bias, but the perception of bias—and the impact that misbelief has on the process by which candidates emerge for office?

That’s the idea proposed by Associate Professor of Political Science Danny Hayes, coauthor of the book Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

He doesn’t deny that sexism exists, but Hayes argues that the days when what a woman candidate wore mattered more than what she said are actually behind us—particularly for elections at the local and state level.

“Today, male and female candidates have few reasons to campaign differently . . . and voters have minimal reason to evaluate them differently,” said Hayes.

“Our misperceptions about the bias against female candidates are fueled by a political discourse that overemphasizes the sexist experience that women indeed sometimes face [and by] the media’s enthusiastic coverage of examples of sexism in politics when they occur.”

Hayes looked at media coverage of 800 U.S. House races involving more than 1,500 candidates across two election cycles from 2010-2014. His research revealed that female candidates run virtually identical campaigns as men— from the issues they talk about to the language they use to the personal traits they stress. “The bottom line is when women run for electoral office, they are just as likely to win as men.”

Hayes points to two factors in contemporary American politics that have essentially leveled the electoral playing field: the declining novelty of female politicians because so many now run, and the polarization of political parties.

“Partisanship is a far more salient issue than whether a candidate is a man or woman,” he explained. “Imagine that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. How much will her gender matter in the outcome of the election?

Most political scientists would conclude a lot less than the fact that she’s a Democrat.”

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Psychology’s Guangying Wu uses lasers and mice to bring peace of mind to schizophrenia sufferers.

Silencing Schizophrenia F

or many people suffering with schizophrenia, the most terrifying aspect of their condition is the voices—the phantom sounds that echo menacingly through their brains. Too relentless to block or ignore, they can take many disturbing forms: verbal tormentors hurling streams of insults, repeated words or phrases, ceaseless laughter and screeches. There often seems to be no escape from the unending auditory anguish.

To date, the scientific community isn’t exactly sure what happens inside the brains of people with schizophrenia to explain these lifedisrupting hallucinations. And until scientists can determine what causes the voices, there is little they can do to effectively quiet them.

But, according to Assistant Professor of Psychology Guangying Wu, there is nothing inherent in the known physiology of schizophrenia to account for the chorus of sounds and voices. “The auditory hallucinations shouldn’t be happening; they simply shouldn’t be there,” he explained. “It’s one of the mysteries of the brain.”

brain. Current treatments focus on the global effects of antipsychotic medications on large clusters of brain cells. But Wu believes that, by targeting single defective neurons and the network they form, his group can find insights and clues on how to comfort the world’s 55 million schizophrenia sufferers without the often debilitating side effects of current medications.

Isolating individual neurons, however, “is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

“It’s a very big haystack and a very tiny needle.”

OF MICE AND MRI Wu’s research focuses on the brain’s complex system for processing auditory information.

He received a $65,000 Young Investigator Grant from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression foundation to study communication in mice for answers to schizophrenia’s symptoms.

Wu is trying to crack that mystery—with the help of student researchers, colleagues in other scientific disciplines and a pack of genetically engineered mice. In his lab, part of the interdisciplinary Institute for Neuroscience, Wu uses lasers and ultrasound recordings to study the tiny brains of mice for clues to schizophrenia in humans.

Scientists like Wu have theorized that the auditory hallucinations experienced by 70 percent of people with schizophrenia—and 15 percent of those with mood disorders like depression—are caused by enhanced brain activity. They believe schizophrenia over-stimulates brain cells, either in the prefrontal area, which controls our reasoning, or in the cortex, our auditory region.

Wu hopes to pinpoint individual misfiring neurons within a web of billions inside the

“For healthy people, these areas are wellcontrolled. They are not generating excessive

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Photos: William Atkins

Student researcher Emily Bragg observes rodents’ reaction to sound.

spikings of neurons because the excitation and inhibition is balanced in these regions,” Wu explained. “But for people with disorders, those neurons spontaneously generate too much activity, even when there is no actual sound to stimulate them.”

Still, those conclusions remain only theories for now, because there is no good technique for directly testing the human brain. The most up-to-date imaging method is the functional MRI. But that instrument lacks the precision and resolution to identify individual neurons and observe how they interact with networks of brain cells. The functional MRI captures hundreds of thousands of neurons at the same time, but Wu’s goal is to capture the activity of a single neuron.

With no adequate means to test humans, Wu turned to mice. Mice brains may be small but, like humans, they contain distinct visual, auditory and olfactory fields. In his lab, Wu and his team—which includes an undergraduate research assistant, a postdoctoral scientist and a technician—work with a nest of 120 transgenic mice. The rodents have been engineered to carry a gene that increases their likelihood of developing schizophrenia. Their altered brains emit fluorescent light waves that the team captures with a device called a two-photon laserscanning microscope. The laser maps the fluorescent neuron readings with and without a sound stimulus. If the neurons fire too much when no sound is present, the mice brains show likely schizophrenic conditions.

Wu theorizes his research will reveal that the enhanced brain activity is the result of an imbalance in chemicals. Perhaps dopamine, the neurotransmitter that excites the brain, is elevated. Or maybe there are reduced levels of glutamate, the chemical that activates inhibitor neurons to “silence the brain.” Or both scenarios may be present.

Most antipsychotic drugs regulate dopamine and glutamate levels. But they’ve shown only varying success, and often cause a profusion of side effects like involuntary movements and abnormal behavior. “From a pharmacology point of view, if we know exactly which neurons to pinpoint, we can design more efficient and safer drugs,” Wu said.

Black Hole

Death by

Columbian College astrophysicist observes destruction and afterlife of a star.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS ALEXANDER VAN DER HORST AND A TEAM OF ASTROPHYSICISTS BECAME THE FIRST TO OBSERVE THE COMPLETE PROCESS OF A SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE DRAWING IN A STAR, RIPPING IT APART AND EJECTING AN OUTFLOW OF MATTER—A SO-CALLED “COSMIC BURP”—MOVING AT NEARLY THE SPEED OF LIGHT.

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heir research, published in Science, tracked the star’s destruction and the simultaneous eruption of a short, spectacular radio flare—an unprecedented scientific observation. “We have never seen matter from a star streaming into a supermassive black hole and the black hole emitting a stream of matter at the same time,” van der Horst said. “This is a very important boost for this area of research.”

Supermassive black holes—the largest of the ultra-dense areas of space whose gravitational pull not even light can escape—are believed to be at the center of most massive galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Examining the lifecycles of black holes can lead to a new way of studying phenomena like gravity and extreme activity in the universe. Similar astronomical observations have aided in the development of technologies including panoramic photography, the Global Positioning System and solar panels.

“In our drive to understand the universe better, astronomers have to come up with many innovative techniques and instruments,” van der Horst said. “These usually have a much larger application than ‘just’ getting a better understanding of our universe.”

The emission of a jet of matter from a supermassive black hole is not new to scientists; jets are observed emanating from many celestial objects, including neutron stars, dying massive stars and stars at the beginning of their lifecycle. But many of their properties, especially their formation, remain mysterious.

“Normally, these jets in supermassive black holes are very steady,” van der Horst explained. “The black holes are just there, continuously emitting particles. But there are a lot of questions about how they’re formed. So now that we know how to look

A star being drawn toward a black hole and destroyed.

Image: Amadeo Bachar

for them—since we’ve seen the transition, the jet turning on and off—it will help us understand how black holes and jets work.”

The destroyed star, about the size of our sun, was first observed in its bright death throes by a team from Ohio State University using an optical telescope in Hawaii. “We could find it with radio telescopes because it was relatively nearby,” van der Horst said. At a distance of about 300 million light years, the star’s home galaxy is earth’s neighbor in cosmic terms. Previous observations were at least three times farther away.

Alerted to the sighting, van der Horst’s team quickly turned radio telescopes in the Netherlands and United Kingdom on the trapped star. It was as early in the timeline of stellar-death-by-black-hole as radio information has ever been gathered. By combining it with data from optical and X-ray telescopes, the team could glean “a multiwavelength portrait” of the entire event.

The finding by radio telescope is particularly significant, van der Horst said, because such instruments have only recently been made sensitive and wide-ranging enough to capture similar occurrences on a regular basis.

“Most of the sky is fairly static and only changes over millions or billions of years,” he said. “But there are some events that take place on more of a human timescale— days, weeks, even seconds. If you want to look for those events, you need a wide horizon and a fast response time, and radio telescopes have never before had this big field of view or versatility.”

As even more precise instruments are built to survey the skies, the next step will be to manage the massive influx of data. “We have to compile all this information and get a complete picture of what is going on so we can come up with a detailed and thorough explanation of this light and radiation,” van der Horst explained. “Then we can see how it fits into the big picture of supermassive black holes and the jets that are so ubiquitous in the universe.”

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BIGGER

Wasn’t Better for Early Humans Human Paleobiology’s Mark Grabowski reveals that, when it comes to the origins of our species, size didn’t really matter.

Mark Grabowski examines early hominins fossils.

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cientists have long believed that a body mass growth spurt kick-started early human development. But Mark Grabowski, assistant research professor in the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, rocked the evolutionary studies world by revealing that, when it comes to the origins of our species, size didn’t really matter.

Using state-of-the-art methodology and the largest sample of early hominin fossils ever assembled, Grabowski produced the first large new set of body mass estimates in more than 20 years. His study revealed that early human ancestors were smaller than previously believed. As a result, a body mass boost could not have been the catalyst for modern human evolution.

genus and the large-toothed, solid-jawed australopiths. In the study, which was published in The Journal of Human Evolution, Grabowski and his co-authors debunked the notion that early members of the Homo genus had a body mass that approached modern human levels. Instead, evidence of body-size increase doesn’t occur in the known fossils until later in Homo erectus, the first species widely found outside of Africa.

“Our results found no evidence that the earliest members of the Homo genus— which includes our species Homo sapiens, or modern humans—differed in body mass from earlier australopiths, some of the earliest species of hominins,” said Grabowski, a biological anthropologist and evolutionary biologist. “In other words, the factors that set our lineage apart from our earlier ancestors were unrelated to an increase in body size, which has been the linchpin of numerous hypotheses on the origins of our genus.”

Numerous theories regarding the origins of Homo hinge on the purported body-size jump at specific times in the evolutionary chain. Until now, anthropologists have relied on estimates presented in a 1992 paper by Henry M. McHenry, a renowned professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. McHenry himself cautioned that his findings were merely a “first step” and not a definitive analysis. But over time, those results have become the standard touchstone for fossil hominin body estimate. Since the McHenry study—the last major review of hominin body size—new fossils have been discovered, species attributions have been clarified and methods improved, according to Grabowski. He described his findings as the most comprehensive set of body mass estimates and species averages by sex for fossil hominins to date.

Long-accepted theories have surmised that a body-size increase—coinciding perhaps with an increase in meat consumption—significantly widened the evolutionary gap between Homo

Body size still plays a key role in evolutionary science and is vital for understanding early species’ place in the natural world, Grabowski noted. It is linked to a host of species-devel-

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opment factors such as energy requirements, home range size, relative brain size, locomotion, diet, life history and behavior. “Our results in no way suggest there was no connection between body size and evolution,” Grabowski said. But inaccurate body size estimates also distort our understanding of a species’ relationship to its epoch and its environment.

“For example, home range size [the area occupied during the life of an animal or human] is related to body size. If the species’ body size was smaller than our previous estimates then our home range sizes are also off.”

Beyond the body mass bombshell, Grabowski also uncovered important hints to early human’s social structures. The study revealed that the size difference between males and females, known as sexual dimorphism, decreased to modern human-like levels later in our lineage than previously thought. Low levels of dimorphism suggest a monogamous social structure, while high levels correlate with more “harem-like” social structures as seen, for example, in gorillas.

“Levels of dimorphism seem to reflect how groups are organized, whether there is an alpha male and lots of females, or a onemale/one-female structure,” Grabowski said.

The findings challenge evolutionary assumptions that the early Homo genus lived in monogamous circles.

in brief GW Rises Among Research Institutions

Restoring C-3PO’s Starry Shine

GW’s standing among premier research institutions is on the rise, according to a National Science Foundation survey. The university’s federal and overall research expenditures increased by 15 percent since 2010. (Columbian College reported a 10 percent increase in fiscal year 2015 alone.)

The upward trend can be traced to a commitment to transforming the university’s research profile—from attracting expert faculty and erecting the new Science and Engineering Hall to expanding global research efforts and outpacing peers in recruiting women faculty and students in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

Even droids from a galaxy far, far away need a touch-up now and then. Thanks to restoration work by Mary Coughlin, an assistant professor in the Museum Studies Program, Star Wars’ iconic C-3PO blasted-off into his own Smithsonian exhibit alongside Dorothy’s ruby slippers and Kermit the Frog.

An objects conservator who has worked on items such as a bazooka and President Franklin Roosevelt’s leg braces, Coughlin said the well-worn robot wasn’t in stellar shape. But with the aid of tools as varied as a meat carver and a squirrel-hair brush, she and the Smithsonian team restored an authentic gleam to C-3PO’s gold coating.

Corcoran Returns Stained Glass Windows

Balla Named Fulbright Distinguished Chair for China

For decades, a trio of 17th century stainedglass windows created by the Flemish artist Jan de Caumont sat in a closed section of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design’s 17th Street building. Today, two centuries later, the windows have been returned to their original home in a Belgium abbey. The delicate glass panels were carefully removed, restored and repatriated. After passing through different hands for a century, the windows were bought by an American collector who donated them to the arts institution. “The return of these windows to their original home is a fitting conclusion to their time at the Corcoran,” said Corcoran Director Sanjit Sethi.

Associate Professor of Political Science Steven Balla realized a lifelong academic and personal dream when he was named a Fulbright Scholar of Public Administration and Public Policy in China. Based at the Nankai University in Tianjin, he will apply his expertise in policy-making strategies, environmental policy and public health to issues that are crucial to both the United States and China. “Understanding how policy is made and implemented in both countries is crucial, given how central the United States and China are to global outcomes in such areas as economic performance, environmental protection, and the occurrence and resolution of military conflicts,” he said.

‘Tree of Life’ Draft Published

The Mystery of Machu Picchu

Keith Crandall, director of the GW Computational Biology Institute, co-authored the first draft of the “tree of life” for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes. Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life—some containing upwards of 100,000 species—but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life. The project is a collaborative effort among 11 institutions.

It depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.

The iconic Incan citadel of Machu Picchu has guarded its ancestral secrets for centuries.

Now, Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Bradley and a team of researchers are analyzing the 400-year-old skeletons buried in the Andes fortress for clues to the origins of the lost empire. As part of a National Science Foundation-funded study, Bradley is sequencing the skeletons’ ancient DNA, hoping to better understand the functional role of Machu Picchu, as well as patterns of diversity, migration and labor diaspora in the Inca Empire— the largest in pre-Columbian America.

Human Brain Molded by Environment What it is about the human brain that makes us so different than chimpanzees? New research led by postdoctoral scientist Aida Gómez-Robles (above) from the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology discovered that human brains exhibit more plasticity—the ability to be molded by the environment—than chimpanzee brains, providing an important clue as to why humans are so capable of adapting to various conditions and cultures. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the first ever scientific attempt to examine the heritability of brain organization in chimpanzees compared to humans.

Student Film Puts a Lens on Black Lives Matter School of Media and Public Affairs graduate student Zinhle Essamuah’s (right) 28-minute documentary on the unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore—and the unfolding Black Lives Matter movement—is commanding attention around the country.

Hands Up progressed to the semifinals of the national 42nd annual Student Academy Awards, putting it in the top 5 percent of all films submitted. It also was screened at a number of film festivals, including the Columbus International Film & Video Festival where it won the Free Press Award.

Triceratops Gets a Cousin The Ceratopsia family is growing with the discovery in China of a new species of plant-eating dinosaur, a relative to the Triceratops. A research team led by James Clark, the Ronald Weintraub Professor of Biology, and Associate Professor of Biology Catherine Forster found skeletal remains of the horned dinosaur Hualianceratops wucaiwanensis, which lived approximately 160 million years ago. It stood on its hind feet and was about the size of a spaniel. Its discovery suggests that the Jurassic Period had more species diversity than previously thought.

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Among the recent research grants received by Columbian College was a five-year, $2.6 million award from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to Cynthia S. Dowd (chemistry) to study new approaches in the treatment of malaria and tuberculosis. Her research focuses on identifying enzyme inhibitors—a molecule that stops chemical reactions—to fight the pathogens found in both diseases and disrupt the ability for malaria or tuberculosis to spread.

the developing embryo; Nemes was also named a Beckman Young Investigator, which awards promising faculty in the sciences with $750,000 in research funding. // Guillermo Orti (biology): $688,000 from NSF to provide a unified framework that includes fossil and living species for comparative analyses; and $397,896 from NSF for collaborative research on the role of habitat transitions in parallel marine fish radiations.

Cynthia Dowd

Major New Research grants The following are the college’s other new grant awards of $200,000 and above: // Cross-disciplinary team of geographers, political scientists and migration experts: $3 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to examine extreme weather cycles in Arctic cities and measure impact on environment and socio-economic development. // Christopher Edward Brick (history): $225,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the work of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers project. // William Briscoe (physics): $286,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a data analysis center for hadronic and electromagnetic interactions.

// Alexander Dent (anthropology): $248,155 from NSF for a project titled “Cellular Connections: Phone Trouble and its Repair among Teens in Washington DC.” // Maria Pia Gualdani (mathematics): $410,000 from NSF to study differential equations in collisional kinetic theory. // Stuart Licht (chemistry): $251,000 from the Office of Naval Research to investigate ways to transform the U.S. Navy’s energy and fuel chain.

// Chet Sherwood (anthropology): $999,000 from NSF to examine differences in vocal learning and sound-symbol associations among chimpanzees. // Sarah Shomstein (psychology): $564,472 from NSF to determine how attentional allocation is structured in the face of uncertainty. // Lizbeth Courtney Smith (biology): $300,000 from NSF to study the diversity of animal immunity and somatic DNA modifications in the sea urchin. // Ako Vertes (chemistry): $380,832 from the Curators of the University of Missouri for the development and refinement of a “molecular microscope” capability based on ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry.

// Shannon McFarlin (anthropology): $371,517 from NSF for research on the physical ontogeny and life history of wild mountain and western gorillas.

// Adelina Voutchkova-Kostal (chemistry): $494,543 from NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development to support her academic and research work in green chemistry and the design of safer chemicals.

// Peter Nemes (chemistry): $395,853 from NSF to support research in microsampling single-cell mass spectrometry for examining cells in

// Huixia Wang (statistics): $298,474 from NSF to develop a statistical framework for modeling and predicting conditional quantiles in data-sparse regions.