Jerod Weinman (Computer Science) National Science Foundation Grant
Jerod Weinman (computer science) has been awarded a grant of $299,762 from the National Science Foundation to host a National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) conference for four-year institutions (as well as a set of virtual roundtables preceding the conference). This conference will build on the NAIRR Pilot project, which aims to connect U.S. researchers and educators to computational, data, and training resources needed to advance AI research and research that employs AI (and is supported by a wide range of federal and non-federal partners). This grant is one of five conference grants that are being coordinated by the Computing Research Association, a partner on the project; the other grants support conferences for different institutional types. The key goals of this project are to facilitate increased instructional capacity and a community of practice among faculty at four-year institutions who will implement new AI courses or modules into undergraduate educational pathways, identify a shared understanding of best practices for inclusive AI education relevant to four-year institutions, improve confidence of instructors at 4-year institutions in utilizing NAIRR Pilot resources that are listed on nairrpilot.org, and develop plans for including AI content in courses at four-year institutions, with the use of NAIRR Pilot resources when computational resources are needed. Weinman's collaborators on this project include Ran Libeskind-Hadas, chair of the Department of Integrated Sciences at Claremont McKenna College; Lisa Meeden, professor of computer science at Swarthmore College; and Michael Wollowski, professor of computer science and software engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology; as well as Tracy Camp, executive director and CEO of the Computing Research Association, and Mary Lou Maher, director of Research Community Initiatives at the CRA.
Tamara Beauboeuf (Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies) Franklin Research Grant
Tamara Beauboeuf (gender, women's, and sexuality studies) has been awarded a Franklin Research Grant of $4,500 from the American Philosophical Society to support a book project regarding the family of Edith Renfrow Smith '37, including a cousin of her mother named Eva Pearl Green. Beauboeuf’s book, You may call me Eva P: Portraits of a willful Black matriline, 1837-1937, centers Black women's oral memory as an important and often overlooked source of historical insight as it argues for the importance of Black feminine willfulness in the stories maintained over the last two centuries in the Renfrow family. The book will explore the efforts that this family of women made to align their outer worlds with their inner beliefs, leading to achievements like Edith Renfrow Smith's becoming the first Black woman to graduate from Grinnell and Eva Pearl Green co-founding, and serving as a business leader in one of the oldest and largest all-Black communities established after the Civil War (Mound Bayou, Mississipi). Grant funding will support Beauboeuf's travel to Mississippi to conduct archival research on Mound Bayou and interview the founders of Mound Bayou Museum.
Kristen Burson (Physics) Department of Energy Visiting Faculty Program Grant
Kristen Burson (physics) has been awarded a Department of Energy (DOE) Visiting Faculty Program (VFP) grant to support her ongoing research project with Anibal Boscoboinik, a scientist at Brookhaven National Lab. The VFP program allows faculty members from certain institutions (those not classified as "Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activity” or “Doctoral Universities: High Research Activity") to collaborate with scientists at DOE-funded national labs over the summer. The VFP program provides stipends for faculty and student participants, as well as support for travel and housing during their stay at the national lab. Burson’s project, entitled “Trapping Noble Gases in Silicate Cages of Various Sizes,” will develop and analyze ways to capture xenon and other noble gases in silicate nanocages using specialized equipment at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven. This research will help develop cost-effective trapping for low concentrations of noble gases crucial in nuclear non-proliferation, noble gas production, removing waste products in nuclear energy production, and other applications. The grant will allow Burson and two Grinnell students, Joyce Lin ’26 and Andrea Roy ’26, to travel to Brookhaven National Lab and conduct the research with Boscoboinik and his lab. Burson previously won a VFP grant in 2024, allowing her to work with Dr. Boscoboinik at Brookhaven along with Eric Genet '26 and Shabab Kabir '26.
Grinnell College Hearst Foundations Grant
Grinnell College has received a grant of $150,000 from the Hearst Foundations to strengthen its recruitment of, and support for, transfer students from two- and four-year institutions. Over the course of this three-year grant, Grinnell plans to roughly triple its enrollment of transfer students (to 25 per year) and improve transfer persistence and graduation rates. We will accomplish this by developing a targeted recruitment approach for transfer students, adding a spring transfer cohort, and developing a program of activities to strengthen transfer students’ connections to Grinnell and to each other. We will also conduct a formal assessment of our program (in partnership with the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College) to produce generalizable knowledge on supporting transfer admissions at elite residential liberal arts institutions. Our work to strengthen transfer admissions has been shaped by our relationship with the Summer Scholars at Chautauqua program, a cohort-based program for honors students at community colleges that (among other activities) provides students with support and guidance on the transfer process. Dan Sullivan, a leader of the Summer Scholars program and former president of St. Lawrence University, identified Grinnell as an ideal institutional partner for transfer students. The Hearst Foundations also support an endowed scholarship fund at Grinnell for students with significant financial need; this endowment was established through a series of grants running from 1992 to 2000. The proposal development team includes Joe Bagnoli (Enrollment, Admissions & Financial Aid), Sarah Fischer (Admissions), JC Lopez (Student Affairs), Elaine Marzluff (Biological Chemistry), Christian Morris ’18 (Admissions) , and Nick Phillips (Spanish, Curriculum & Academic Program)s; along with Kate Ferraro (Academic Advising) who will play a key role in implementation.
Laura Ng (Anthropology) Fund for Wyoming Archaeology of the University of Wyoming's George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology Grant
Laura Ng (anthropology) received a grant of $9,000 from the Fund for Wyoming Archaeology of the University of Wyoming's George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology for an archaeology project on the Rock Springs (WI) Chinatown. This program supports archaeological projects conducted within the state of Wyoming. Ng's grant will support a three-week dig in southeastern Wyoming involving her, up to four Grinnell students, and two other archaeologists, Paul Hoornbeek (an Iowa-based archaeologist) and Dudley Garner (Professor Emeritus, Western Wyoming Community College). Rock Springs was one of the two largest Chinatowns in Wyoming in the late 19th century and was home to a large number of immigrants, many of whom worked for the Union Pacific Railroad Company. In 2024, Ng co-directed excavations at the Evanston and Rock Springs Chinatowns with Gardner to support the National Historic Landmark nomination of these sites as key locations in the 1885 Chinese Massacre, a nationally significant murder of 28 Chinese coal miners by a white mob; their work is profiled in a March 2025 New Yorker article by Michael Luo. Ng's broader project on Wyoming Chinatowns involves archaeological work at Rock Springs (and another community, Evanston), oral history interviews with descendants of community members, and analysis of immigration patterns between Rock Springs/Evanston and villages in the Pearl River Delta, whence many of the Chinese immigrants to these communities came. Her work will explore Chinese immigrants' experience of racial violence before and after the 1885 massacre (and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act), as well as exploring questions of transnational flows of goods, people, and ideas. In addition to this Frison Institute award, she has also received a 2025-2026 Harris Faculty Fellowship from Grinnell College in support of her project.
Charlotte Christensen (Physics) Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) Grant
Charlotte Christensen (physics) has been awarded a grant of $66,000 from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). Christensen is a participant in a three-year "Scialog" (science dialogue) convening of about fifty scientists funded by RCSA entitled "Early Science with the LSST," which is meant to advance the foundational science needed to realize the full potential of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Christensen, along with her colleagues Nora Shipp (University of Washington) and Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil (Dartmouth College), will pursue a project entitled "Dwarf Debris and Dark Matter: Searching for Evidence of Hierarchical Formation in the Stellar Halos of Dwarf Galaxies." Each investigator received a grant of $66,000, bringing the total funding for this project to $198,000. The funding for the grants comes from RCSA as well as the Heising-Simons Foundation, The Brinson Foundation, the Leinweber Foundation, and independent philanthropist Kevin Wells (Executive Director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics). For predominantly undergraduate institutions like Grinnell, the Scialog program allows our investigators to access funding from these partnering funders, most of which rarely if ever support investigators at liberal arts colleges.
Heriberto Hernández (Chemistry) Department of Energy Grant
Heriberto Hernández (chemistry) has won a grant of $717,876 from the Department of Energy (DOE) for a project entitled "Fundamental studies of the influence of ligands on the molecular structure of noble metal nanoclusters." Hernández's grant is issued by the DOE's Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) program, which is designed to "build research capacity, infrastructure, and expertise at institutions historically underrepresented in the DOE Office of Science (SC) portfolio." FAIR grants support partnerships between Emerging Research Institutions (basically, non-R1s) like Grinnell, or minority-serving institutions, with other institutions like DOE Labs or Office of Science scientific user facilities. Hernández will be partnering with Dr. Grant Johnson at the Pacific Northwest National Research Lab, continuing a multi-year collaboration that they have sustained through three DOE Visiting Faculty Program grants won by Hernández, which allowed him and his students to work in Johnson's lab for ten-week periods over several summers. Through the grant, they will study conditions affecting the electronic and molecular structures of small noble metal nanoclusters, using experimental and computational approaches. These nanoclusters have many practical applications in energy storage and conversion and in biosensing, bioimaging, biomedical diagnosis, and therapy. The award allows support for twelve MAP students, who will spend part of their summer MAPs visiting Johnson's lab with Hernándes – an opportunity for students to connect with DOE scientists at a variety of career stages, as well as other students and faculty working as visitors at the DOE, and to work with the world-class facilities.
Susan Ferrari (Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations), Shonda Kuiper (Statistics), Peter-Michael Osera (Computer Science), and Andrea Tracy (Student Academic Life & Psychology/Neuroscience) Receive Faculty Career Enhancement Awards from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest
Susan Ferrari (Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations), Shonda Kuiper (Statistics), Peter-Michael Osera (Computer Science), and Andrea Tracy (Academic Life & Psychology) received Faculty Career Enhancement Awards from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) as part of multi-institutional teams for the following projects:
- Shonda Kuiper (statistics) along with Tyler George (Cornell College), Katherine Harris (Beloit College), and Brittney Miller (Coe College), received a grant of $16,500 for a project entitled “Developing Inquiry-Based, Narrative Modules for Data-Driven Courses,” which will support the creation of classroom resources that emphasize real-world applications for data-based decision making.
- Peter-Michael Osera (Computer Science) along with Destiny Crider (Luther College) and Marc Falk (Coe College), received a grant of $8,500 for a project entitled “Leveling Up Grading in the Liberal Arts,” which will support a reading group and conference on alternative grading techniques, including mastery-based grading, specifications-based grading, and “ungrading” for participants at ACM institutions.
- Andrea Tracy (Student Academic Life and Psychology/Neuroscience) along with Cate Denial (Knox College) and Jen Jacobsen ’95 (Macalester College), received $22,500 for a project called “Sustainable Strategies for Supporting Well-Being and Academic Engagement for Faculty and Students,” which will allow them to offer a series of regional workshops meant to help faculty develop effective, sustainable, and role-appropriate ways to support student well-being and academic engagement.
- Susan Ferrari (Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations) and Andrea Tracy (Student Academic Life and Psychology/Neuroscience) along with Mario Affatigato (Coe College), Fallon Allison (Knox College), Anna Beno (Lawrence College), Kimberly Dickson (Lawrence College), Deanna Donohue (Lawrence College), Margaret Koker (Lawrence College), Kristina Pagel-Martinez (Lawrence College), Tess Powers (Colorado College), Julie Rana (Lawrence College), Erika Schwictenberg (Macalester College), and Christopher Tassava (Carleton College), received $21,500 for a project entitled “Collaborative NSF ADVANCE grant preparation to address challenges facing women in STEM,” which will support a survey, focus groups, and a summer convening to help ACM faculty, staff, and administrators prepare a collaborative grant to the NSF ADVANCE program, which supports gender equity in STEM professions.
The FaCE program has been in existence for about 20 years, supported by a series of grants from the Mellon Foundation to the ACM; and this is its final cycle.
Samuel Burt (Libraries) IEDA/Iowa Arts Council Iowa Artist Career Accelerator Award
Samuel Burt (libraries) has been selected as a new artist in the Iowa Artist Career Accelerator Program for 2025. He received a grant award from the Iowa Economic Development Authority/IEDA of $2,292 he plans to use for writing workshops. Burt joins other new artists in peer learning and mentorship opportunities, and business development resources for artists of all disciplines to catalyze momentum in their artistic practices and increase their professional skills and capacity. This IEDA/Iowa Arts Council program is funded in part through a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jenelle Veit (Auxiliary Services) IEDA/Iowa Arts Council Arts Project Grant
Jenelle Veit (Auxiliary Services) has received a grant of $13,700 from the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA)/Iowa Arts Council to bring Butcher Brown to Grinnell for a concert and master class on songwriting and the music business as part of the College's Public Events series. Butcher Brown is an internationally recognized jazz fusion quintet based in Richmond, Virginia; their work incorporates elements of jazz, hip-hop, soul, funk, and R&B. (If you’d like a sense of their sound, you can check out Butcher Brown’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert .) Both the performance (tentatively scheduled for March of 2025) and the class will be free and open to the public.
Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Mellon Foundation Grant
Grinnell College has received a grant of $142,000 in support of our Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship(MMUF) program. This cohort-based program is the central component of the Mellon Foundation's efforts to increase diversity in institutions of higher education; it is committed to supporting a diverse professoriate (through helping students pursue PhDs in humanistic fields) and to promoting the value of multivocality in the humanities and related disciplines, elevating accounts, interpretations, and narratives that expand present understandings. Grinnell's grant supports approximately ten students every year (five juniors and five seniors) with stipends, travel and research funding, faculty mentoring, and other support to help them pursue academic careers.
Peter-Michael Osera (Computer Science) National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering's Formal Methods in the Field Program Grant
Peter-Michael Osera (computer science) has received an award, along with colleagues at Iowa State University and the University of Iowa, from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering's Formal Methods in the Field program, which brings together researchers in formal methods with those in other areas of computer science and engineering. Their project, “Integrating Formal Methods into the Foundational Undergraduate Curriculum,” will develop new pedagogy that better highlights the connections between mathematics and computer science. By using program reasoning as a means of studying introductory programming, discrete mathematics, and algorithms, this new pedagogy will better prepare students to make the leap from introductory computer science courses (which are usually more concrete and centered on programming) to upper-level theoretical courses rooted in abstract mathematics. As part of the grant, Osera and his colleagues will disseminate their work to the computer science educator community through regional and national meetings. The total award amount for this NSF grant is $248,445 and Grinnell’s share is $96,015.
Conard Environmental Research Area (CERA) Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust Grant
Grinnell College has been awarded a grant of $200,000 from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust to support infrastructure improvements at the Conard Environmental Research Area (CERA). The grant funds will support renovating residential space attached to CERA's Graham Lab to allow us to host visiting scholars, writers, and artists; expanding our maintenance shed to better house our fleet of vehicles and equipment; repairing a fence separating CERA from a public road, addressing safety and security concerns; and installing a wall display highlighting CERA on our main campus (in Noyce) to raise awareness of how CERA contributes to teaching and learning at Grinnell for both internal audiences and visitors. The grant also includes funds to help CERA's faculty, staff, and student interns connect with staff at other field stations across the state and to host events once the renovations are complete to help campus partners consider how best to incorporate CERA into their research, teaching, and programmatic work. This gift helps with the delivery of the strategic plan's promise to deepen our stewardship of the environment and to expand programmatic activities around community outreach, environmental education, research, monitoring, and land management.
Meredith Paker (Economics) Alliance for the Advancement of Liberal Arts Colleges Workshop Grant
Meredith Paker (economics) has been awarded a $20,000 workshop grant from the Alliance for the Advancement of Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC). The funds will allow Paker and her collaborators, Amanda Gregg (Middlebury College), Steven Nafziger (Williams College), and Jenny Bourne (Carleton College), to host a workshop for faculty members at liberal arts colleges entitled “Using Digital Tools to Understand the Past: New Methods in Economic History” in spring 2025. The workshop will showcase research in economic history that draws upon state-of-the-art analytical methods, share best practices for incorporating digital tools into interdisciplinary research and teaching, and foster collaborative relationships, networking, and mentoring among liberal arts faculty members working in economics and related fields.
David Harrison (French and Arabic) Alliance for the Advancement of Liberal Arts Colleges Workshop Grant
David Harrison (French and Arabic) has received a workshop grant of $20,000 from the Alliance for the Advancement of Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC). This award will allow Harrison, along with his colleagues Hélène Bilis (Wellesley College) and Hélène Visentin (Smith College) to host a workshop entitled “Performing Early Modern French Theatre and History in the Twenty-First Century: New Approaches and New Pedagogies For the Liberal Arts” on Grinnell College’s campus in 2025. The workshop will bring together professors of French, history, and theatre/performance studies to discuss how collaboration between these disciplines can imbue the teaching of early-modern French literature, history, and theatre with new energy — for example, by exploring ways in which contemporary directors are highlighting issues of racialization, colonialism, and religious identity in staging the classics of French theatre. In addition to keynotes, panel discussions, and other sessions led by faculty members, the workshop will feature French actor and director Aurelien Recoing, who can provide perspectives on how contemporary directors are handling historical material. The workshop coordinators hope to incorporate the insights from this workshop into an open-access digital handbook for teaching early modern French theatre to undergraduate audiences.
Charlotte Christensen (Physics) Scialog Fellow by the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement
Charlotte Christensen (physics) has been named a Scialog Fellow by the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement (RCSA). The Scialog (short for “science dialogue”) program brings interdisciplinary groups of 50 early-career faculty members together around a topic of key scientific importance and, over a three-year period, provides them with guidance from senior facilitators, opportunities to form multidisciplinary collaborations, and seed funding for their research. The Scialog for which Christensen was selected, “Early Science with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST),” will bring together astronomers, theoretical physicists, data scientists, and more to analyze data from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will be carried out by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory starting in late 2024. This open-access dataset will be higher in volume, velocity, and complexity than any previous astrophysics experiment and could spark an extraordinary era of discovery into fundamental questions about the Universe. This Scialog is co-sponsored by RCSA and the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Brinson Foundation, and the Leinweber Foundation.
Qiaomei Tang (Chinese and Japanese) Ying-shih Yü International Center for History and the Chinese Humanities Visiting Fellow Program at National Taiwan University
Qiaomei Tang (Chinese and Japanese) was awarded a spring 2025 visiting fellowship from the Ying-shih Yü International Center for History and the Chinese Humanities (YCHCH) Visiting Fellow Program at National Taiwan University (consisting of a living and research allowance of NT$300,000, plus air travel and office access). This award will support Tang during her 2024–25 sabbatical, in which she will work on her current book project, Gender, Genre, and Jealousy in Medieval China. Arising from her doctoral research on divorce in early medieval China, this project provides a comprehensive depiction of jealousy (as depicted in diverse genres of writing, including literature, historiography, medicine, and religion) in China between the first and ninth centuries and explores the way in which different genres of writing evolved to discuss specific gendered forms of jealousy.
Logan Lee (Economics), Arnold Ventures Grant
Logan Lee (economics) received a grant of $50,545 from Arnold Ventures to support a research project on how in-prison education affects a variety of outcomes for incarcerated people, including in-prison infractions, reincarceration, and post-release education and employment. Lee is collaborating with Romaine Campbell, a postdoc at Arnold Ventures, on the project, which will draw upon data from the Iowa Department of Corrections, the Iowa Department of Education, Iowa Works, and Grinnell College’s Liberal Arts in Prison Program. The analysis is designed to avoid some of the factors that often confound research on prison education programs, such as selection bias related to which individuals choose to participate in prison programs, and to assess the impact of different types of educational opportunities (e.g., remedial education vs. liberal arts courses vs. job training courses). This project is particularly timely because the number of prison education programs has been on the rise since 2015, as Pell Grant eligibility has been extended to first a subset of prison programs operated by 67 institutions and, in 2023, to all programs attended by eligible incarcerated students. The expansion of funding is expected to lead to further expansions in the number of prison education programs, making it more important than ever to understand the impact of a range of different types of programs on the outcomes of incarcerated students. The insights that Logan and Romaine will produce (in the form of a peer-reviewed article and policy briefs for the Iowa Departments of Corrections and Education) will both contribute to the academic literature on this topic and will help inform policy decisions around prison education in Iowa and beyond.
Pascal Lafontant (Biology), Fulbright Scholar Grant
Pascal Lafontant (biology) has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar Grant to conduct research in Sri Lanka. This grant will allow him to travel to the University of Peradeniya to pursue his project, “In Search of the Giant Danio: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Cement Gland of the Devario of Sri Lanka.” The cement gland is an unusual transient organ that hatchlings of the genus Devario (the giant danio, a relative of the more well-known zebrafish) use to attach to various substrates until they are able to swim; after that, the gland disappears by their second week of life. Lafontant and his students have published several papers on the cement gland, which they have studied in lab settings, but the Fulbright award will allow him to study these animals in their natural habitat. The award will allow him to study whether cement glands are widely distributed in the Devario species of Sri Lanka and whether the process that drives the emergence of the gland is conserved in the giant danio and cichlids (such as angelfish); it will also allow him to delve into the history of science by investigating a scientist named S. Jones, who originally discovered the cement gland in 1938.
Charlotte Christensen (Physics) and Mike Conner (Linux Systems), National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure-Research Alignment Subprogram Grant
Charlotte Christensen (physics) and Mike Conner (Linux systems), as part of a team of faculty and staff at the Grinnell College, University of Northern Iowa, Macalester College, Central College, and Coe College; have received a planning grant from the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure-Research Alignment Subprogram. The entire one-year grant is entitled, “High-performance computing solutions for small Midwest institutions,” and totals $173,368 to plan a regional high-performance computing network. The funding allows the participating institutions to convene to discuss their research and classroom needs for high-performance computing and to identify opportunities for using centralized resources to meet these needs; it will also help them consider expanding the network to include other local institutions, including community colleges.
Kristen Burson (Physics) and Heriberto Hernandez (Chemistry), Department of Energy's Visiting Faculty Program
Kristen Burson (physics) and Heriberto Hernandez (chemistry) have been selected for the Department of Energy’s Visiting Faculty Program. Through this program they will collaborate with scientists at Department of Energy-funded national labs over the summer. The program provides generous stipends for faculty and student participants, as well as support for travel and housing during their stay at the national lab. Burson is collaborating with Dr. Anibal Boscoboinik at Brookhaven National Laboratory to analyze the physical capture of noble gases (like radon, argon, and xenon) using silicate nanocages. The long-term potential uses of this research include nuclear energy production, nuclear waste management, nuclear non-proliferation, and medical isotope production. Burson will be joined by two Grinnell undergraduates, Eric Genet ’26 and Shabab Kabir ’26. Hernandez will continue his long-term collaboration with Grant Johnson at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to study the synthesis and characterize the size, distribution, stability, and structure of gold and silver nanoclusters, which have potential applications in catalysis, light-energy conversion, and biotherapeutics. He will be joined by Isabel Voinescu ’26.
Barbara Trish (Political Science and Rosenfield Program), Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations
Barbara Trish (political science and Rosenfield Program) received a £27,736 Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations. The award helps Trish advance her work on the use of AI in political campaigns in the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which will run general elections in fall 2024. While in residence, she will conduct research in collaboration with REPRSENT employees, hold a masterclass on interviewing political elites within the context of U.S. campaigns, offer public-facing lectures and research seminars, and work with faculty, staff, and students interested in similar issues. Per the research center, the Leverhulme Visiting Professorships are intended to help United Kingdom-based institutions bring “eminent senior professor[s] from overseas to bring genuinely novel expertise and enhance the skills and knowledge of academic staff and students in an underrepresented area in the United Kingdom.”
Elias Saba (History and Religious Studies), Life Worth Living Faculty Course Development Fellowship from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture’s Life Worth Living Program
Elias Saba (history and religious studies) has won a 2024 Life Worth Living Faculty Course Development Fellowship of $15,000 from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture’s Life Worth Living Program. This program, which is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, supports professors who are designing courses that “will guide [their] students through a process of discerning their philosophies for a flourishing life.” In addition to funding, this fellowship program will provide Saba with opportunities to connect with other professors designing courses with similar goals through in-person and virtual workshops and roundtables. This project will build on the work that many in our humanities department have been doing to help students think about how their disciplines offer a guide to the life well lived — and to our broader mission to educate students to honorably fulfill the duties of life and serve the common good.
Darrius Hills (Religious Studies), Louisville Institute’s Sabbatical Grant for Researchers Fellowship
Darrius Hills (religious studies) received a fellowship award of $40,000 from the Louisville Institute's Sabbatical Grant for Researchers fellowship program. This award will help him take a one-year leave in 2025 to pursue work on his second book project, A Tale of Two Cities: Muscular Christianity and Red Pill Masculinity. This project will explore how masculinity is articulated at the intersection of American evangelicalism and popular culture; and Hills shows how modern American evangelicalism’s masculinist turn revisits the Victorian movement of “Muscular Christianity” and how this religious movement intersects with masculinist philosophy trafficked by online content creators.
Susan Ferrari (Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations), National Science Foundation Grant
Susan Ferrari (Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations) and a collaborative team have been awarded a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation GRANTED program for “the Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs group (CLASP): Broadening Participation and Deepening its Community of Practice.” In addition to Ferrari, the CLASP team includes Charlotte Whited (Carleton College), Renee Cox (North Park University), Amy Cuhel-Schuckers (The College of New Jersey), Beth Jager (Claremont McKenna College), Tania Johnson (The International School of Management), Tess Powers (Colorado College), and Megan Uebelacker (Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles). Staff at the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College will play a key facilitation role in the grant. The funds will be used to help advance the work of CLASP. As an organization, CLASP serves more than 650 grants officers at predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUIs). Ferrari is CLASP’s outreach officer and the former chair of its advisory group.
Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Grant Renewed
Grinnell College received the $138,000 renewal of a grant that supports the College’s Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. This program is the central component of the Mellon Foundation’s efforts to increase diversity in the faculty ranks of institutions of higher learning nationwide by supporting students from groups historically excluded from the academy as they pursue Ph.D.s. The grant renewal will allow Grinnell to continue to support two five-student MMUF cohorts each year with stipends, travel and research funding, faculty mentoring, and other assistance to help them pursue academic careers. Karla Erickson (sociology) is currently serving as the director for this program.
Craig Quintero (Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies), Taiwan Creative Content Agency Grant
Craig Quintero (theatre, dance, and performance studies) has received a $154,000 grant from the Taiwan Creative Content Agency to develop an immersive virtual reality theatre experience entitled “BLUR” that will premiere in January 2025. Quintero will direct the project, which is a co-production involving his Taiwan-based theatre company, Riverbed Theatre, and PHI Studio in Montreal. In addition, Quintero was recently featured as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Their feature on Quintero highlights his past virtual reality work, including “Over the Rainbow,” which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and was recently featured at the Venice Immersive — a component of the Venice Biennale.
Idelle Cooper ’01 (Biology), National Science Foundation Facilitating Research at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions Program Grant
Idelle Cooper ’01 (biology) has been awarded a $448,258 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Facilitating Research at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions program for a project entitled “RUI: Conflicting Selection Pressures within Mate Choice of Jeweling Damselflies” (DEB-2242987). Cooper wrote this grant while employed at James Madison University but was able to bring it with her to Grinnell College when she accepted her position here, which began this August. Her project will address a fundamental question in evolution: how mate choice affects the divergence — or coherence — of species. She will observe two species of naturally co-existing damselflies to better understand how two types of selection pressures involved in mate choice (sexual selection and species recognition selection) interact to affect trait evolution and speciation. This four-year project will engage Grinnell College students in fieldwork in Michigan and Ontario, as well as research on Grinnell College’s campus. Cooper is also a visual artist, and she will collaborate with her students to produce an art exhibition entitled “Tangled Banks,” which will share with public audiences the experience of researching damselflies in river environments, forging connections to indigenous tribes located near the fieldwork sites, and build upon Cooper’s long-term efforts to highlight the role of art in the teaching of scientific concepts and the potential of art to expand diversity in the scientific field.
Petrouchka Moïse (Cultural and Community-Based Digital) and Fredo Rivera ’06 (Art History), Green Family Foundation Trust Grant
Petrouchka Moïse (cultural and community-based digital) and Fredo Rivera ’06 (art history) have just received a grant of $10,000 from the Green Family Foundation Trust to co-sponsor a workshop on Digital Lakous that they are running as part of their National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Program for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant. “Lakou” is a Haitian Kreyol term describing a shared public space within a village or amongst homes. In their NEH grant, Rivera and Moïse proposed creating a “digital lakou” as a virtual collective for individuals and organizations involved in creating and sustaining digital resources on Haitian art. A September 2023 workshop convening academic and cultural leaders will launch the virtual lakou. The Green Family Foundation Trust grant allows them to include partners from institutions based in South and Central Florida as well as additional experts presenting on Haitian art and culture.
Eiren Shea (Art History), Fritz Thyssen Foundation Grant
Eiren Shea (art history) and her colleagues Ittai Weinryb (Bard College) and Qiao Yang (Max Planck Institute) have been awarded a conference support grant of €20,000 from the Cologne-based Fritz Thyssen Foundation. (Funds will be administered by the Max Planck Institute.) These funds will allow Shea, Weinryb, and Yang to host a conference entitled “The Golden Horde: Art, Material Culture, and Architecture, 1227–1502” this December in Berlin. The Golden Horde — a khanate originating in the Mongol Empire — was once a powerful political entity that controlled 25 percent of the world’s territory. Despite its influence, and despite growing scholarly interest in cultural exchange between the Mongol Empire and other civilizations, (e.g., through the Silk Road), the art and material culture of the Golden Horde have been underexplored — especially by scholars working in English. This conference will help Shea and her colleagues gather international experts on these topics to catalyze more comprehensive study of this important area.
Andrew Graham (Chemistry), National Science Foundation Mid-Career Advancement Program Grant
Andrew Graham (chemistry) has been awarded a grant of $237,317 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Mid-Career Advancement program. This is a relatively new program supporting mid-career scientists advancing their careers by gaining new skills through mutually beneficial partnerships with scholars at other institutions. Graham is working with Elizabeth Swanner (Iowa State University) and Diana Thatcher (Iowa State University) in launching a new research project that explores the impact of changing regulatory policies and climate change on mercury accumulation in marine ecosystems. Graham and his collaborators will study mercury accumulation in mollusk shells found off the coast of Maine (in both living organisms and historical collections of shells) to establish a high-resolution, long-term record that can be used to improve biogeochemical-climate models and determine how mercury accumulation has responded to natural climatic variability over the last millennium. In addition to protected time to earn new skills, the grant is providing opportunities to build a professional network in this new research area while aligning with Graham’s research projects, teaching, and research opportunities for Grinnell students related to issues of climate and other global environmental change.
Sharon Quinsaat (Sociology), Midwest Sociological Society Grant and Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant
Sharon Quinsaat (sociology) has won a grant of $3,500 from the Midwest Sociological Society in support of a project entitled “Crossing Borders, Moving Right: Social Origins of Conservatism Among Filipino Immigrants in the U.” Quinsaat, along with her collaborator Nico Ravanilla (University of California San Diego, political science), has also received a $30,000 Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant to support their project, “Understanding Support for U.S. Conservative and Right-Wing Politics among Filipino Immigrants.” This project will explore the formation of conservative attitudes and beliefs among Filipino immigrants by administering surveys and conducting interviews and participant observation in Hawaii, which is the state with the longest history of Filipino immigration. This is the first phase of a study that will be conducted at a variety of sites in the U.S. Russell Sage’s Pipeline Grants program is offered in collaboration with the Economic Mobility and Opportunity program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Corasi Ortiz (Chemistry), Social Science Resource Council’s Sloan Scholars Mentoring Network Grant
Corasi Ortiz (chemistry) has received a Seed Grant of $7,500 from the Social Science Research Council’s Sloan Scholars Mentoring Network (SSMN), with funds provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant will allow Ortiz to launch a new line of research and apply her expertise in nanoparticle synthesis to the creation of “nanozymes” — ultrafine particles that can be used to catalyze biochemical reactions in place of enzymes. While a graduate student in chemistry at Purdue University, Ortiz was named a Sloan Scholar and invited to join the Sloan Minority Ph.D. Program, a scholarship program that supports the graduate education of underrepresented scholars in STEM disciplines. Upon their doctoral graduation, these scholars continue to receive support via the Sloan Scholars Mentoring Network. As an active Sloan Scholar, Ortiz has access to leadership training, professional development, networking, mentoring, and competitive grant opportunities like the one funding her recent award. The SSMN grant provides seed funding to Ortiz’ laboratory, allowing her to expand her research from the synthesis of nanoparticles (extremely small particles) to their use as enzyme substitutes in biochemical reactions.
Leslie Gregg-Jolly (Biology) and Katya Gibel Mevorach (Anthropology and American Studies), Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges Grant
Leslie Gregg-Jolly (biology) and Katya Gibel Mevorach (anthropology and American studies) along with Phoebe Lostroh ’94 (Colorado College, molecular biology), have been awarded a prestigious workshop grant of $20,000 from the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC). This grant recognizes their outstanding work and will enable them to host an enlightening workshop for liberal arts faculty. The workshop, titled “Unteaching Racism: Understanding and Handling Misuse of Racial Categories,” aims to provide faculty members with a comprehensive understanding of the historical context, deployment, and impact of racial categories. By examining how these categories have been misused to perpetuate racist ideologies, the workshop seeks to empower faculty to challenge and dismantle these harmful practices. One of the primary objectives of the workshop is to support faculty members, particularly those in fields where racial categorization is common, such as the life sciences, to develop effective strategies to teach about racism. By equipping educators with the tools to address implicit and explicit remnants of scientific racism, the workshop aims to disrupt and ultimately eradicate misinformation that perpetuates discriminatory practices. The AALAC grant underscores the significance and potential impact of this workshop, and this collaborative effort will foster meaningful dialogue and critical engagement with issues of race and racism within the academic community.
Brigittine French (Anthropology and Global Education) and Ashley Laux (Faculty-Led Learning), U.S. Department of State’s Increase and Diversify Education Abroad for U.S. Students (IDEAS) Program Grant
Brigittine French (anthropology and global education) and Ashley Laux (faculty-led learning) have received a grant from the U.S. Department of State’s Increase and Diversify Education Abroad for U.S. Students (IDEAS) Program funding a site-based workshop for faculty and staff to deepen and expand Grinnell’s offerings in course-embedded travel for semester courses across the curriculum. The workshop will focus on inclusive pedagogies and increased student mobility in Latin America. Grinnell College is one of 34 U.S. colleges and universities in 28 U.S. states to be awarded a grant from IDEAS Program, which aims to develop and expand study abroad programs around the world. Of the 34 U.S. colleges and universities, eight are community colleges and 13 are minority-serving institutions. The selected proposals will develop new international partnerships, train faculty and staff, internationalize curriculum, engage diverse students in study abroad, broaden the destinations where U.S. students study, and create virtual and hybrid exchanges. The IDEAS Program contributes to the State Department’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts to engage the American people in foreign policy.
Eiren Shea (East Asian Studies), Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Grant
Eiren Shea (East Asian studies) has received a research grant of $15,000 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Shea will travel to Taiwan and China to conduct research for her second book project, tentatively titled Adornment and Identity in Middle Period China. This project will be a comprehensive study of adornment from the Tang through Yuan dynasties, providing new insights into identity, gender, society, and religion during a period that saw significant cultural exchange and social upheaval. In addition to conducting research in museums, textile research centers, and libraries, Shea will engage in generative conversations with colleagues based in Taiwan and China.
Fredo Rivera ’06 (Art History) and Petrouchka Moïse (Cultural and Community-Based Digital), National Endowment for the Humanities Program for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant
Fredo Rivera ’06 (art history) and Petrouchka Moïse (cultural and community-based digital) received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Program for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources for their project entitled “Haitian Art Digital Crossroads.” The project will enable Rivera and Moïse to digitize over a thousand Haitian artworks held at several sites in Haiti and the United States and incorporate them into a multilingual database. The database incorporates an innovative set of metadata that will provide a new framework for Haitian art — with consideration to cultural nuances, artistic practices and materials, Kreyol linguistics, and the Haitian art market. This grant will build upon previous funding received from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council of Library and Information Resources. In addition to collaboration with Grinnell College library personnel as well as with museum professionals and artists in the U.S. and Haiti, the project will involve Grinnell College undergraduates in creating the database.
Brigittine French (Anthropology and Global Education), National Endowment for the Humanities Program for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant
Brigittine French (anthropology and global education), has received a grant of $50,000 from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program of the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her project entitled, “Maya Testimonies in the Visual History Archive: Transcribing, Translating, and Accessing Survivor Life Histories.” This grant will allow French and her collaborators to transcribe a subset of a collection of about 650 oral histories related to the genocide of indigenous Maya people in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, which are held at the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California. While the oral histories will generally be transcribed into Mayan-Spanish or Kaqchikel, a subset will also be translated into English to facilitate their broader use. Transcribing and translating these oral histories will allow them to be used more broadly among both survivor communities and in research on genocide and other aspects of peace and conflict studies. Ultimately, French and her collaborators hope to build on this to produce a complete set of transcriptions and translations of the oral histories.
Elizabeth Rodrigues (Humanities and Digital Scholarship), Mellon Foundation Grant for a Mellon New Directions Fellowship
Elizabeth Rodrigues (humanities and digital scholarship) has received a grant of $220,000 from the Mellon Foundation for a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. This program allows mid-career scholars in the humanities to undertake formal training in fields outside their own to be able to conduct high-quality cross-disciplinary projects. Rodrigues’s project, “Computing for Context, Computing as Context,” will enable her to undertake training in statistics, mathematics, and computational practice that will prepare her to evaluate the underlying logics of algorithmic processes used in computational textual analysis, and reflect on the application of these tools from the perspective of an experienced practitioner to engage the potentials of computation while resisting computationalism. She will implement these methods in her developing project examining African American and multiethnic autobiographies of the early twentieth-century U.S. as formal peers to more traditionally modernist texts – which builds upon her recently published book, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early 20th Century U.S. Literatures. This fellowship will also enhance Rodrigues's teaching, contributions to the Digital Studies concentration, and her support of digital humanities research and teaching across campus.
Edward Cohn (History), National Council for Eurasian and East European Research Grant
Edward Cohn (history) has received a grant of $18,500 from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research to conduct research on the “prophylactic chat,” a policing tactic used by the KGB to fight dissent, particularly along its western frontier. Cohn’s research argues that this was not a simple intimidation tactic, but rather a sophisticated surveillance approach involving elements of social science research that anticipated later developments in crime control like “broken windows” policing (and the current actions of Russian and Belarusian secret police that influence modern-day politics in Russia and its border nations). The grant will allow Cohn to conduct archival research — primarily in Moldova and Latvia, but also in Lithuania and Estonia — drawing on KGB files and other sources.
Clare Boothe Luce Program of the Henry Luce Foundation Grant
Grinnell College has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Clare Boothe Luce (CBL) Program of the Henry Luce Foundation to support two CBL professors. The College’s nominations for professors in the mathematics and statistics department, Christy Hazel and Jenny Kenkel, have been accepted by the Clare Luce Booth Program. Hazel and Kenkel will begin teaching at the College in the fall of 2023. The Clare Boothe Luce Program is one of the foremost sources of support for women in STEM in higher education; and the grant includes support for training and research. Grinnell College appears to be the first liberal arts college to be awarded a grant for multiple CBL professorships. The faculty members who led the development of this proposal include Nicole Eikmeier (computer science), Shonda Kuiper (mathematics and statistics), Elaine Marzluff (chemistry), Jennifer Paulhus (mathematics and statistics), and Paul Tjossem (physics). The grants follows the College’s fourth submission to CBL in five years.
Tammy McGavock (Economics), International Food Policy Research Institute Grant
Tammy McGavock (economics), has received an award of $67,729 from the International Food Policy Research Institute), a sub-award of a larger project funded by USAID, to support a project entitled “Enhancing the impacts of gender training: Encouraging men to share the load through repeated remote reinforcement messaging.” McGavock is one of four co-PIs on this project, including the lead Ethiopian researcher on this grant, Tigabu Degu Getahun (EconInsight and Policy Studies Institute, Ethiopia), and Ellen McCullough and Thomas Woldu Assefa (University of Georgia). In addition to publishing and presenting their work in scholarly venues, the research team will present their findings at the Policy Studies Institute and to NGOs and other relevant stakeholders.
National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant
Faculty members at Grinnell College have received another Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Grant from the National Science Foundation. Clark Lindgren (biology), Keisuke Hasegawa (physics), Pascal Lafontant (biology), Vida Praitis (biology), Josh Sandquist (biology), and Mark Levandoski (chemistry) were awarded the grant (DBI- 2216359)of $499,553 to purchase a laser scanning confocal microscope. The instrument will be a breakthrough in the research capabilities of faculty and students throughout the sciences at Grinnell. The grant comes only weeks after faculty in the Department of Chemistry also received an NSF MRI Grant to purchase a 400Mhz NMR Spectrometer. With both grants, faculty applicants submitted multiple proposals over several years. Their success reflects the significance of their research and their dedication to exemplary science education and mentorship. Laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM) allows researchers to obtain high-resolution images of cell structure and the location of proteins within cells. The technique scans an object’s surface with a focused laser beam, reconstructing it pixel by pixel as the laser excites fluorescent proteins in the sample. With LSCM, scientists can obtain much higher resolution images than those possible with conventional microscopes and can also create 3-D reconstructions of samples by layering images captured at different depths.
National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant and Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust Grant
Five faculty members in the Grinnell College Department of Chemistry have been awarded a Major Research Instrumentation Grant of $399,990 by the National Science Foundation (CHE-2216273). The grant, along with a $195,000 grant recently awarded to Andy Mobley (chemistry) and the department by the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust, will fund the purchase of a 400MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer, broadening the possibilities of campus research and hands-on learning. Chemistry faculty members Andy Mobley, Erick Leggans, Steve Sieck, Molly MacInnes, and Leslie Lyons submitted several iterations of the NSF MRI grant proposal in several application cycles, which ultimately rose to the top of an extremely competitive pool of applications.
Mark Levandoski (Chemistry), National Science Foundation Re-Entry to Active Research Grant
Mark Levandoski (chemistry) received an award for $123,674 in 2022 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to assist him in re-engaging in his academic research after a four-year period serving as one of the College’s associate deans and interim registrar. Levandoski’s research expertise focuses on the molecular pharmacology of neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which play a key role in nicotine addiction as well as neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and attention disorders. NSF funding will help him to expand his skillset and apply new techniques to understand the mechanism of the receptors by learning a computational research approach called molecular dynamics. The grant will help support Levandoski’s travel to the lab of Erik Lindahl (Stockholm University, Sweden), a Swedish neuroscience collaborator, so that Levandoski can get hands-on experience. Grinnell students also will benefit from being able to work with Levandoski in his campus research lab, and from his introduction of innovative techniques like computational modeling, molecular dynamics simulations, and cryo-electron microscopy topics into his upper-level biophysical chemistry course.
Sarah Purcell (History), Knox College Bright Institute
Sarah Purcell (history) was selected to be part of the Bright Institute at Knox College, a three-year program for liberal arts college professors of American history before 1848. Purcell will incorporate her current research project on the contested history of the Bunker Hill Monument into a variety of courses on early American history, transatlantic eighteenth-century history, and beyond. The institute is an in-residence summer program and includes funding to cover travel and lodging costs in addition to $3,000 each of the three years in support of research.
Chris Jones (Special Collections), Council for Library and Information Resources’ Digitizing Hidden Collections Grant
Chris Jones (Special Collections) is a collaborator on a project, “Amplifying Black Voices in Iowa from 1880–2020,” receiving funding from the Council for Library and Information Resources’ Digitizing Hidden Collections program. Led by Iowa State University, the project will digitize certain materials in Grinnell College’s collections related to the life of Edith Renfrow Smith ’37, the first Black woman to graduate from Grinnell, the 2019 recipient of an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Grinnell, and most recently our featured guest for the 2021 special gallery dedication and exhibit at Grinnell College regarding her legacy. This effort connects to the larger collaborative project to digitize and provide unified access to a variety of complimentary collections that will elevate the histories, shared experiences, and achievements of Black communities throughout the state of Iowa.
Peter-Michael Osera (Computer Science), National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Grant
Peter-Michael Osera (computer science) received a $524,611 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) in 2021 to support his project, “Foundations and Applications of Constraint-based Synthesis.” Osera’s project deals with program synthesis which is an array of techniques used to automatically generate computer programs and has the potential to democratize programming by allowing non-expert users to use relatively simple, natural specifications to generate code. This project will help Osera further develop his seminar on human-centered programming. He is also focused on discrete mathematics, a second-year course in the computer science curriculum that is very challenging for students. In addition, he plans to continue leading national conversations about teaching math in computer science with a focus on inclusive pedagogy. These NSF CAREER awards are among the most prestigious and competitive grants the NSF awards to early career faculty.
Charlotte Christensen (Physics), National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Grant
Charlotte Christensen (physics) received a $484,300 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) in 2019. The grant supports her study of what spurs and halts the growth of dwarf galaxies and how galaxies form, and includes modeling dwarf galaxies using extremely high-resolution, realistic computer simulations. For the educational component of her project, Christensen will create a set of computational exercises, labs, and open-ended research projects for students that will be integrated into the physics curriculum. Christensen and her colleagues had earlier implemented a computational lab into the 200-level mechanics course with the support of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant, which they found to have particular benefits for female students. Building on this work, Christensen will improve the overall education of physics students by incorporating computational problem-solving. The grant will also allow her to host speakers on campus to speak about diversity and inclusion in the sciences. These NSF CAREER awards are among the most prestigious and competitive grants the NSF awards to early career faculty.