2021 Award Recipients
The Provost's Office is pleased to announce recipients of the 2021 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. Projects awarded funding initiate innovative scholarly inquiry and creative activities that have the potential for significant, sustained impact.
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Eric Chasalow, Music
Engaging a collaborative, open process, I will compose two large-scale multi-form works for renowned soloists, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the Rose Art Museum.The process will be documented and BMOP will release an album of these works together with my Horn Concerto.
William Crown & Pengyi Hong, Heller and Computer Science
This project will use an international panel dataset on HIV to construct a system dynamics model of spending under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and its impacts on HIV control, population dynamics, employment, education, and gross domestic product in 130 countries around the world.
Ben Gomes-Casseres & Pito Salas, IBS and Computer Science
To explore how pedagogy affects student engagement in online discussion courses, and, in particular, how it can enhance equity in the classroom. We will use and develop further a proprietary research tool invented at Brandeis, and will test it more widely at Brandeis.
Charlotte Goudge, Anthropology
This project will focus on developing an archaeological understanding of sustained resilience and adaptation to social and environmental pressures within indigenous populations and connect innovative technological and archaeological methods to examine how Indigenous Croatoan Algonquians interacted with their local environments and new English settlers.
Grace Han & Alexandre Bisson, Chemistry and Biology
Our proposal is an interdisciplinary research project with the goal of understanding how natural protein lattices sustain a diversity of unusual cell shapes. We will develop new molecular probes to visualize the lattice organization at unprecedented resolution, combining Han’s expertise in chemical synthesis and Bisson’s expertise in quantitative cell biology.
Kim Dorothy, English
The Open Corpus Project, modeled off of Ancient Archaeology's Open Context, will be an open-access, centralized hub for standardized manuscript data. It will be an aggregating and interpretive tool, editing and publishing platform that will provide layers of filtering that places traditional data forms in conversation with the material-textual corpus.
Constantine Lignos, Computer Science
There is very little openly accessible text for the world’s less-spoken languages, inhibiting research in natural language processing (NLP) for them. This project consists of the creation and distribution of software and data sets for these languages, enabling research and combating linguistic inequity in language technology development.
Palmira Santos & Kristen Faughnan, Heller School for Social Policy and Management
COVID-19 spurred innovative partnerships that united new groups and individuals in efforts to address homelessness. Using a contextual framework from PLACE MATTERS, we will conduct a case study of two initiatives with new, diverse partnerships to investigate their impact, initial outcomes, and effect on broad-based community commitment to ending homelessness.
Ben Rogers & Thomas Videbaek, Physics
Our proposal aims to initiate a project focused on developing new techniques in creating nanostructural devices.
Amber Spry, Division of Social Sciences
The proposed project examines the nature of group representation in American politics. I request funding to support a new long-term study that will be the foundation of my book project investigating how race and gender influence the public’s evaluation of political candidates. This project also engages the Brandeis Framework for the Future by building research capacity, providing support for undergraduate and graduate research, and investing in data science.
Ramie Targoff & Cameron Anderson & Sarah Mead, English, Theater Arts and Music
This grant is a collaborative project researching and then reinventing for audiences today one of the most important art forms in the English Renaissance--the court masque--and the unique role it afforded to women performers. The project involves the fields of music, theater design, literature, dance, and feminist/gender studies.
Steve Van Hooser & Jonathan Touboul, Biology, Mathematics
The visual cortex of higher mammals has a detailed functional architecture that represents properties such as visual field location, orientation selectivity, spatial frequency selectivity, and inputs from the two eyes. The last remaining map to be understood is direction-of-motion/speed selectivity, which we will study here.
Chuxu Zhang & Steven Wilson, Computer Science and Politics
Automatically inferring emotions in multilingual social media data is critical for understanding human thoughts towards emergent events (e.g., Covid), thus providing guidance for social policy (e.g., lockdown, vaccination). However, there is no sentiment analysis tool capable of identifying emotional nuance across multiple languages. We propose to apply Artificial Intelligence techniques on a large global dataset of social media to build such a tool for general scientific use.