Grants Received 2010-11

Faculty Grant Awards Received

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center – Postdoctoral Fellowship. $2,717. (Tom Arnold, Biology). “Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Estuarine Communities of the Mid Chesapeake Bay: Response of Benthic Species to Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment.” Our oceans have absorbed nearly half of the 250 billion tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution (Sabine et al. 2004). Excess CO2 soaked up by the oceans lowers the pH of seawater and reduces the availability of dissolved carbonate ions (CO2-3) required by calcifying organisms to make calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells and skeletons. We currently have a poor understanding of how this ocean acidification (OA) will impact organisms and communities in marine, and, especially, estuarine systems. To address these challenges, Dr. Arnold has developed a free-ocean-carbon-enrichment (F.O.C.E.) system capable of mimicking OA in the field, under otherwise natural conditions. This funding will support Dr. Arnold’s collaboration with Dr. Whitman Miller at the SERC to characterize the response of two key estuarine organisms – widgeon grass (Ruppia maritima) and the eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) – to the high CO2/low pH conditions of OA. Specifically, the F.O.C.E. system will be deployed in the Severn River, Maryland in order to reduce seawater pH by ~0.4 units, roughly doubling CO2 levels and halving CO2-3 concentrations within 10 replicate plots. The resulting data will improve the understanding of the potential impacts of OA on estuarine species, benefit submerged aquatic vegetation and oyster restoration efforts, and advance F.O.C.E. technology. 

National Science Foundation – Partnerships for Innovation/Innovation Transfer Network. $26,400 subaward through Penn State University – Harrisburg.. (Lars English, Physics) “Development of a Energy Efficient and Versatile Distributed Illumination System.”

Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh – College Equipment Grant Program. $5,585. (Sarah St. Angelo, Chemistry) “Purchase of FT-IR Accessory Kit.” This funding will support the purchase of the FT-IR Accessory Kit. The kit will allow use of a piece of existing equipment in expanded sampling modes. These additional sampling modes will make obtaining data quicker and easier for students. More students should be able to do analyses in a given lab period. Also, these sampling modes are not available with our current equipment, so students will have the opportunity to learn new techniques and faculty can develop new experiments or analyze new samples in research.

Association of Jewish Studies, Legacy Heritage Project. $11,000 (Andrea Lieber, Judaic Studies. “Sippur: Telling Jewish Stories through the Arts.” Jews love to tell stories. While this passion for the narrative arts may have started with the Torah, it certainly didnt stop there. Our series for 2011‐12 will feature an interdisciplinary mix of experts to explore the process of Jewish storytelling through the cultural arts of performance, literature, theatre, music, TV and film. Events will take place at the Jewish Community Center in Harrisburg, and will be scheduled to reach a wide variety of audiences (some daytime, some evenings, some weekends). Sippur has the potential to generate active interest in Jewish studies in the local Jewish community. In our previous series, Hazan et Hakol, those programs that had a cultural dimension were by far the best attended. Based on the very positive response to our programming from the 2010‐11 year, we have put together a program that we feel will be well received by the Harrisburg Jewish community. Sippur, the theme we have selected this year will allow us to tap into a broader range of scholars contributing to Judaic studies on our campus.

Consortium for Ocean Leadership – Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. $19,790. (Peter Sak, Earth Sciences) “Participation in IODP Leg 334 (CRISP, Offshore Costa Rica).” With this funding, Associate Professor Sak will extend the established complex record of vertical tectonism along the northwest coast of the Osa Peninsula to the marine environment. Prof. Sak hypothesizes that the arrival of the Cocos Ridge at the Middle American trench (MAT) is marked by extensive basal erosion recorded as an episode of pronounced subsidence. The timing and rates of subsidence should be preserved in the recovered foraminifera assemblages. Superimposed on this may be smaller amplitude variations in water depth related to bathymetric variations along the flank of the Cocos Ridge, similar to what Sak et al. (2004) recognized in the late Pleistocene stratigraphic section exposed along the northwest coast of the Osa Peninsula. By extending the record of long-term vertical motion offshore of the northwest coast of the Osa Peninsula, it will be possible to constrain the timing of the onset of ridge subduction along the MAT. Utilizing onshore mapping experience would enable Prof. Sak to combine the proposed research with existing onshore datasets. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement with the Consortium for Ocean Leadership for a U.S. Science Support Program associated with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.

National Science Foundation – Research Opportunity Award (ROA). $15,964. (Brett Pearson, Physics and Astronomy). “Strong Field Coherent Control: Interpreting Control Dynamics and Measuring Wave Functions.” This award will support the participation of Brett Pearson in an existing NSF grant to SUNY-Stonybrook under the direction Dr. Thomas Weinacht. Dickinson will participate as a subawardee during academic year 2012.

Templeton Foundation, $55,2056, subcontract to Dickinson through a grant to University of Minnesota from the Templeton Foundation (Thomas Nadelhoffer, Philosophy Department) “The Psychology of Free Will: Laypersons’ Beliefs about Free Will and Behavioral Effects of Altering those Beliefs.” This $300,000 project involves psychologists and philosophers from the University of Georgia, the University of Minnesota, The University of California- Santa Barbara, and Dickinson College.

Uncovering how people think about free will has important philosophical, psychological, and societal implications. Free will is closely tied to people’s beliefs and practices regarding personal, moral, and legal responsibility. As such, understanding laypersons’ beliefs about free will can reveal factors underpinning their selfish versus selfless behavior as well as how they attribute responsibility for their own and others’ behavior. Whether and to what extent people believe in free will might have major implications for how people think, feel, and behave in serious and everyday circumstances.

The research outlined in this proposal will accomplish two aims. The first is to map laypersons’ beliefs about free will and potential threats to this belief, such as determinism, reductionism, dualism, and epiphenomenalism. The second is to use experimental manipulations to alter (weaken or bolster) various aspects of laypersons’ free will beliefs and assess the ensuing behavioral consequences.

 American Philosophical Society – Franklin Research Grant. $6,000. (Andy Rudalevige, Political Science.) “The Unilateral Powers of the Chief Executive: Command, Context, and Constraint”. This project seeks to expand our useful knowledge about the scope and effectiveness of presidential unilateralism. It answers two key questions. First, it takes the first archival look at the formulation of executive orders. Scholars have assumed that presidents face no managerial costs, no collective action problems, as they devise unilateral tactics. Yet the Executive Office of the President, and much more the executive branch, are surely a “they,” not an “it.” Second, it will be the first systematic tracing of orders' effectiveness.

 U.S. Army War College, $35,000. (Jeff McCausland, Security Studies). Funding will support two conferences on Dickinson’s campus entitled “Arms Control and American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century: The Conventional and Nuclear Nexus in Europe. These conferences will gather international scholars as well as military and governmental personnel to examine the challenges to nuclear and conventional arms control posed by the changing character of political entities in Europe/Eurasia at the end of the Cold War. The objectives of the conferences are to provide a more comprehensive and coherent framework for an arms control regime that links the reduction of tactical nuclear weapons to the status of conventional forces in Europe as a means of stabilizing the overall security situation between the United States, Europe, and Russia.

 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars – Kennan Institute – Short-Term Grant. $3,200. (Karl Qualls, History) “Stalin’s Niños: Soviet Education of Refugee Children from the Spanish Civil War, 1937-51” Prof. Qualls will be working at the Library of Congress, which contains memoirs, newspapers, and pedagogical journals that are otherwise inaccessible. Relevant materials will be copied and microfilm of the Comintern archives will be studied. These archives contain information from and about prominent communists working in or with Spain and the USSR. The files will discuss the welfare of Spanish children and the Spanish Communist Party’s directives to Soviet authorities. From the start Spaniards wanted the Soviets to maintain Spanish education, but the Soviets rebuffed proposals and raised the children as Soviets. The Comintern files will clarify some of the policymaking. This research will add to the archival work already started in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (fond A-307 of the Ministry of Education is devoted exclusively to the Houses of Spanish Children) that provides remarkable reports on curriculum, health care and food supply, financing, and work from the children’s own hands.

 American Association of University Women – Postdoctoral Research Leave American Fellowship. $30,000. (Catrina Hamilton-Drager, Physics & Astronomy) “A Statistical Study of Rotation Periods and Disk Indicators in NGC 2362: Examining Disk Locking at 5 Myr.” This fellowship award enables further collaboration on this project with Dr. Christopher Johns-Krull, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University for AY 2010-2011. Since December 2003, collaboration with Dr. Johns-Krull focused on several observing projects aimed at acquiring the necessary data for the tests of magnetospheric accretion theories proposed here. Rotation is a fundamental property of a star that changes throughout its lifetime. Rotation influences mixing of material within a star, including the supply of hydrogen fuel to the core for nuclear burning, and is a key ingredient in the generation of magnetic fields in solar-type stars. Stars themselves form from the gravitational collapse of a rotating molecular cloud core, the result of which is a rapidly rotating, young, pre-main sequence star surrounded by a disk of material out of which momentum involve magnetic breaking in some way. In particular, a magnetic interaction between stars and their circumstellar disks, known as “disk-locking,” is believed to cause spin down of stars during the pre-main sequence evolutionary stage. One way to map out the evolution of angular momentum observationally is to determine the rotation periods (and radii) of stars of different masses and ages. We now have several known rotation periods for stars in clusters of different ages, allowing us to make quantitative comparisons between the observed period distributions of stars with and without disks, drawing conclusions about the evolutions of angular momentum in young stars and the role magnetospheric accretion plays in the process.

 National Science Foundation―Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Program. $199,903. (Tom Arnold, Biology and Amy Witter, Chemistry). “A natural approach to problem-based learning in the undergraduate curriculum: development of an interdisciplinary course, Chemical Analysis in Chemical Ecology.” This funding will support the creation of a new interdisciplinary course. The focus of the course will be to bring together students from the departments of chemistry and biology to learn about modern chemical methods of analysis used to study naturally-occurring chemicals with bioactive properties, including dietary compounds, toxins, pollutants, and chemical cues. The course will be structured such that students will first be introduced to current topics of interest to chemical ecologists (chemical defense, “talking trees,” etc.). The laboratory portion of the course will introduce students to the analytical methodology that is currently being used for analysis of the molecules involved in the phenomena discussed in lecture (volatile collection, GC-MS analysis, LC-MS analysis). Students from both disciplines will benefit from the interdisciplinary aspect of the course, which will allow them to experience firsthand how the experiments discussed in lecture are actually carried out in the laboratory.

National Science Foundation – Informal Science Education (ISE) Program. $120,821 Subcontract through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. (Candie Wilderman/Environmental Studies) “Developing, Validating, and Implementing Situated Evaluation Instruments (DEVISE) to Assess the Impacts of Public Participation in Scientific Research.”  This grant is for a full-development project that will create, test, and make available a suite of evaluation designs and tools for use by professionals who are developing projects in which the public actively participates in scientific research (PPSR). The number of such projects, and the need for their systematic evaluation, is large and growing rapidly.  The main goal of DEVISE is to develop a series of strategies and tools that can be adapted into project-specific instruments for use in rigorous evaluations.  The Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) will begin with DEVISE Phase One, a baseline study that will gather and study the instruments and evaluation designs used by existing PPSR projects.  In DEVISE Phase Two, they will conduct extensive evaluations of two ongoing PPSR programs: CLO’s eBird and Dickinson College’s Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM).  These programs have been chosen to represent different ends of the PPSR spectrum—eBird being “top-down,” where the questions and research protocols are developed by scientists, and ALLARM being “bottom-up,” where the questions and study designs are developed by project participants.  After the Phase Two evaluations are complete we will revise the designs and instruments to integrate feedback from the field. Then, to validate our materials and to address issues of reliability, we will enter Phase Three by field testing the designs and tools across a range of PPSR projects which demonstrate a variety of science content, participant involvement, and project outcomes.  Finally, after final editing and revisions, DEVISE materials will be made freely available on the citizen science toolkit website for use, adaptation, and customization by the ISE field.

 The Danish Arts Council. $1,625. (Bev Eddy, German) Funds were awarded for a speaking engagement at “Ordets Dag” in Randers, Denmark, on November 6.  

Institutional Grants Received

The Henry Luce Foundation – Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE) – Exploration Grant. $50,000. (Neil Weissman/Academic Affairs and Neil Diamant/Political Science and East Asian Studies) Dickinson will use this grant for a project to explore innovative ways of infusing the study of Asia across the curriculum through the lens of the environment and sustainable development. Building upon our well-established programs in East Asian studies, environmental studies and sustainability education, we intend to conduct a series of discussions and activities over a 14-month period beginning on July 1, 2011. Our goal will be to expose faculty and students from a variety of disciplines to the complexities of Asian societies, political systems and environmental problems. Using sustainability as a unifying theme, we will convene a faculty study group during the 2011-2012 academic year, host a series of visiting lectures on campus, and pilot a multi-disciplinary summer program in and around Shanghai in the summer of 2012 that may serve as a model for the development of similar programs with our other Asian partners in the future. Through these activities we intend to create opportunities for the development of new pedagogical and research projects to enrich our curriculum in exciting new ways.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. $100,000 (Neil Weissman/Academic Affairs and Doug Stuart/International Studies) “Collaborative Initiative Between Liberal Arts Colleges and Military Higher Education Institutions.” This grant will support an initiative to enhance collaboration among liberal arts colleges and military higher education institutions. Our intention is to host two planning meetings and a series of follow-on programs among a group of selective liberal arts colleges and their neighboring military higher education institutions. The initiative will facilitate dialogue on the best education for future military and civilian leaders, the need to better understand and enhance civilian-military relations in the post-draft era, and the identification of practical ways to work together. Our goal is to explore and establish long-term collaborations that will simultaneously benefit students and faculty, enhance our institutions’ resources through collaboration, and contribute to the vitality of American democracy.

Teagle Foundation – Engaging Evidence Program. Subcontract to Dickinson through a grant to Bucknell University. (Bob Winston/Academic Affairs) “Enhancing Diversity and Diversity Education at Bucknell, Dickinson and Lafayette.” Bucknell University, Dickinson College and Lafayette College will receive a $300,000 grant from the Engaging Evidence Program to conduct a two-year collaborative project related to diversity and student learning outcomes. Drawing on what we have learned from analysis of various data sets, Dickinson’s goals for our portion of the project will be twofold: 1) to test and evaluate whether incorporating certain components of the successful Posse Foundation model (such as pre-matriculation programming, development of cohorts, and mentoring, etc.) will demonstrably improve specific learning outcomes for male students of color and international students; and 2) to undertake a review and possible revision of our U.S. Diversity requirement. The grant will provide Dickinson with $85,000 in funding to help with several specific activities. First, we intend to expand and enhance the MANdatory program piloted in the fall of 2010 to assist male students of color. Second, we will develop an intensive summer bridge program to better assist incoming international students. Third, we will work with an outside consultant and offer several faculty summer study groups related to revision of our U.S. Diversity requirement. Finally, the grant will support a series of meetings and workshops to share information, expertise and results with our counterparts at Bucknell and Lafayette.

 Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) – Growing Greener. $27,000 sub-award to ALLARM through Pocono Northeast Resource Conservation and Development Council. (Julie Vastine/ALLARM) “Consortium for Scientific Assistance to Watersheds (C-SAW VI).” This sub-award will enable ALLARM to provide technical assistance and mentoring to watershed organizations to carry out volunteer water quality assessments. Through this partnership ALLARM also conducts quality control laboratory analyses for watershed organizations to determine that volunteers are collecting credible data and works with other C-SAW partners to provide educational workshops on specific topics through the end of June 2011.

 Colcom Foundation. $185,000. (Julie Vastine/ALLARM) These grants will support ALLARM’s Marcellus Shale-related technical assistance for volunteer groups who are monitoring water quality in western Pennsylvania. Over the next two years, this work will: 1 ) Strengthen the protocol: ALLARM will continue to conduct quality control testing of the parameters and techniques recommended in its Marcellus Monitoring protocol; 2) Conduct rotating regional and countywide workshops: ALLARM will deliver monitoring technical assistance throughout the Western PA Marcellus Shale play, including training workshops, quality assurance/quality control, and follow-up assistance; 3) Develop an equipment dissemination plan: Create an equitable plan and guidelines for the distribution of volunteer monitoring kits and data loggers for county conservation districts; 4) Develop online training resources: ALLARM will create electronic resources and post them on our website, which will include refresher training videos, voiceover PowerPoint presentations, and links to ALLARM webinars. Additionally these resources will be helpful for a potential train-the-trainer program, which will include county conservation districts, museums, and environmental education centers; 5) Advise and develop data management tools: ALLARM will continue to advise volunteer friendly interfaces for data management systems like Fractracker and STORET and explore an interim data storage system until a statewide data management - appropriate for volunteer monitors - is in place. The first $100,000 of this grant will be used to purchase water quality monitoring equipment for volunteer monitoring organizations. The second $85,000 will be used to support ALLARM’s activities related to the project.

The Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Foundation. $500,000. This grant supplements our existing Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Scholarship Fund to provide additional tuition assistance to worthy students.

  Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board – Program to Reduce Underage and Dangerous Drinking. $15,000. (Tim Poirier, Dean of Students Office) This funding will be utilized to create a new initiative at Dickinson College. Over the past three years, the Division of Student Development has partnered with Outside The Classroom to implement AlcoholEdu For College, an on-line alcohol education program, for all incoming first-year students. Through this program, we have gathered a robust data set about first-year students. This initiative aims to expand the College’s partnership with Outside The Classroom so that we can continue to implement AlcoholEdu and use that data to inform a traditional “social norms” campaign. We also hope to explore further partnerships with Outside The Classroom to retrieve data on the entire student body.

 U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Emerging Young Professionals Program: Environment. $499,984. Doug Edlin (Political Science); Ed Webb (PoliSci & Int'l Studies); Center for Global Study & Engagement. “Across Borders: Managing Trans-Boundary Environmental Resources in the Near East and the United States”. This collaborative project between Dickinson and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies will enroll two diverse groups of emerging community leaders and educators for two, four-week exchange/study institutes on the U.S. and environmental issues.  A multinational group of 17 selected from Israel, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Territories will attend the session at Dickinson College in summer of 2012; a group of 17 selected from a national pool in the U.S. will attend a session at AIES in summer 2011. The project will explore topics concerning the contested natural resources in the Negev Desert, Jordan Valley and Gulf of Aqaba, and in the Chesapeake Bay watershed region of the U.S. An interdisciplinary program of study and site visits, combined with experiential learning and skill building activities, will highlight the way environmental, economic, social and political factors converge in each region.

The George I. Alden Trust. $85,000. This funding will support the costs associated with the renovation of Kaufman Hall, specifically for spaces in the Center for Sustainability Education.

U.S. Department of Justice – Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) – Campus Grant program.  $298,037.  (Leonard Brown, Dean of Students and Susannah Bartlow/Women’s Center)  This grant will fund a project to expand and enhance Dickinson College’s response to sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking on campus with the goal of ensuring a comprehensive and collaborative continuum of services.  The project has four main objectives: 1) to create a coordinated community response to violence against women on campus, building on the efforts of Dickinson’s existing Assault and Sexuality Coalition; 2) to establish a mandatory prevention and education program about sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking for all incoming first-year and transfer students; 3) to train campus police to respond effectively in sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking cases; and 4) to train members of campus disciplinary boards to respond effectively to charges of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking.  These objectives will be accomplished by: 1) hiring a full-time Violence Prevention Coordinator (a temporary, three-year position) to coordinate these activities during the grant period and to institutionalize successful new policies, procedures, and activities to sustain the project beyond the grant period; 2) expanding Dickinson’s limited direct victim advocate services through new contracts with two nonprofit, nongovernmental victim service agencies—Sexual Assault/Rape Crisis Services of Cumberland County and Domestic Violence Services of Cumberland and Perry Counties;  3) working closely with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, well as with the Office of District Attorney of Cumberland County, which will serve as consultants for training and education efforts for students, campus police, and members of disciplinary boards.

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