2017 Award Recipients
The Provost's Office is pleased to announce recipients of the 2017 round of Provost Research Awards. Any Brandeis faculty or staff member involved in research, scholarship, or creative activity in any field was eligible to apply for an award. Proposals awarded funding initiate innovative scholarly inquiry and creative activities that have the potential for significant, sustained impact.
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Trends, Patterns, Quality, and Costs of Hospital Utilization among Working-age Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders
The purpose of this study is to use population-based data to identify national trends, patterns, quality, and cost of hospital utilization among working-age adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
The Horsehead’s Return: Gray Seals Rewilding New England
Book project: A general interest nonfiction book about the story of the gray seal’s return; its life history; its complicated reception by residents, tourists and fisher-folk; and scientists’ work to understand its role in the ecosystem. Check out The Haul Out, a blog Elizabeth writes about seal life on Cape Cod.
Black Freedom Database and Mapping Project
In an historical database of refugee camps as pivotal meeting grounds for emancipation, Cooper examines refugee camps over the course of the Civil War period, connecting and comparing experiences across the South.
Modeling ALS using patient-derived stem cells
To translate our novel cellular pathways in ALS pathogenesis from fruit-flies and rats into therapies, the important next question to address is, how relevant these pathways are for progression of cellular pathology in human patients, whether they are perturbed similarly and result in equivalent cellular defects.
Measuring Polyphony: Digitally Mediated Access to the Music of the Middle Ages
The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw an unprecedented increase in the production of manuscripts transmitting repertories of polyphonic music. This project offers new possibilities for mediating the scholarly and public experience of this richly evocative music.
Desiring Death: An Ethnographic Inquiry into Aid-in-Dying in the United States
Amid the shifting legal climate around aid-in-dying practices in several US states, this multi-year research project aims to investigate how aid-in-dying has changed the ways North American patients and their families think about and manage the end of life.
Forgotten Voices: Ocean identity and heritage of the Raizal people of Colombia’s San Andres Archipelago, western Caribbean
Examining ocean heritage through the voices of these indigenous island people will expand knowledge of identity, territory, patrimony, and human connections to the sea; potentially contributing to more effective, equitable policy and management. This project will explore “marine sense of place” in the worldview of the Raizal people of Colombia's San Andres Archipelago.
An interdisciplinary approach to unraveling viral adaptation
The Ivanovic Lab in Biochemistry and the Rogers Lab in Physics will develop a collaborative project to tackle questions related to viral adaptation that are intractable within traditional academic boundaries.
“The winter of 1932-33 and the Fragmentation of the World”
Book project: In 1932-33, the world dissolved into competing nationalisms in the run up to the Second World War. Different as they were, such beliefs yet conspired that winter to wreck what was left of the fragile experiments in world order of the 1920s.
Religious Divorce Practices in Boston: Muslim and Jewish Perspectives
We will study why and how American Muslims and Jews use both religious and civil law when seeking to end their marriages, paying special attention to gender issues and the challenges facing Muslim and Jewish women in their particular religious legal systems, with the goal of strengthening our social justice support for affected women.
Spread of risky prescribing behavior in prescriber patient-sharing networks
The project will use 2010 – 2016 data from Maine’s prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) to examine prescriber patient-sharing networks in relation to risky prescribing behavior.
Outsmarting smart bugs: blocking immune evasion by Lyme and other pathogens
To overcome the challenges around antibiotic treatment of Lyme disease, I aim to develop a new class of drugs that potentiates our body’s ability to effectively eliminate the pathogen by blocking its ability to evade our immune system.
The Roots and Rhetoric of Contemporary Chinese Nationalism
Rosenberger studies Xi Jinping’s rhetoric to see which traditional themes he has abandoned or reshaped; he then compares Xi's use of these terms to the language of protest as seen on social media sites such as Wechat and Baidu.
The Paradox of Ambiguity Perception
We propose a deeper investigation into the role of ambiguity perception as an antecedent to ambiguity aversion, with focus on the socioeconomic correlates of ambiguity perception. In particular, we want to know whether more ambiguity perceptive decision-makers also are more ambiguity-averse.
Testing dense electrode arrays for studying neural networks
A major goal of neuroscience is to understand how the billions of neurons in the brain work together in networks to mediate perception and behavior. The purpose of this second application is to focus on generating this experimental data so that external funding applications from NSF or NIH will be successful.
An Examination of the German Climate Movement and Germany’s Path to a Socio-Ecological Transformation
Book project: The German climate movement is deeply divided about the right path to the urgently needed radical socio-ecological transformation of our societies required to address the climate crisis. The question is why.
