Featured Awards – June 2017

Michael Boyle • Communication Sciences and Disorders
Advancing Academic Research Careers Award
American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation
$5,000
This award will support mentored activities for Dr. Boyle in both teaching and research.

Gerard Costa • Center for Autism and Early Childhood Mental Health
Project LAUNCH 2016 – 2017 – Supplement
NJ Department of Children and Families
$321,169
This award provides supplemental funding for “Project LAUNCH”, which trains providers in Essex County in evidence-based curricula that aim to enhance the caregiver-child relationship and promote emotional and relational wellness.

Jonathan Cutler • Mathematical Sciences
Problems related to the enumeration of independent sets in graphs
Simons Foundation
$42,000
This award will support Dr. Cutler’s efforts to improve our understanding of various connections between various enumerative extremal problems by identifying methods (e.g., entropy, containers, compression) that may apply in situations that have not yet used them.

Jonathan Howell • Linguistics
Establishing a ground truth for focus placement in naturally-occurring speech
National Science Foundation
$105,894
Dr. Howell’s two-year project will develop a method of automatically detecting focus that is both computationally effective, e.g. for the purpose of representing focus in language technologies, and linguistically transparent, e.g. to understand how focus is realized acoustically and conditioned pragmatically.

Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo • Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Leveraging Quebec Expertise in Translation Pedagogy
Quebec Government Office in New York
$3,500
This award will support a conference on translation pedagogy to include preeminent academic experts from Québec. Given Canada’s unique situation as an officially bilingual country in North America, Québec institutions have developed an invaluable expertise in the area of translator training and translation studies from which MSU and other institutions in the United States will greatly benefit.

Jamaal Matthews • Educational Foundations
CAREER: How Urban Adolescents Come to Think of Themselves as Mathematicians – Year 4
National Science Foundation
$156,256
Dr. Matthews’ five-year project studies how African American and Latino middle and high school students construct their sense of self-identity with and in mathematics and the role that teachers play in helping to shape those self-opinions. In conjunction with this project, Matthews has developed and implemented a mentorship program in Newark, NJ based on this research. This mentorship program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SmBNruQ4ZM) aims to support character development skills and a value of mathematics among young males of color.

Eileen Murray • Mathematical Sciences
Amir Golnabi • Mathematical Sciences
Adjunct Mathematics Instructor Resources and Support: Improving Undergraduate Precalculus Teaching and Learning Experience
National Science Foundation
$300,000
This three-year project will measure the impact of course coordination and support on adjunct mathematics instructors’ knowledge, instructional practices, and job satisfaction, and, ultimately, student academic success and retention.

Nicole Panorkou • Mathematical Sciences
When counting cubes is not enough: Exploring volume measurement dynamically
National Academy of Education
$70,000
Dr. Panorkou’s two-year project aims to resolve students’ difficulty in developing a conceptual understanding of volume measurement through Dynamic Measurement for Volume (DYME-V). DYME-V engages students in building 3D objects through dynamic experiences of ‘sweeping’ lengths and ‘extruding’ areas, constructing in that way a meaning of volume as a continuous structure that can dynamically change based on three linear measures: length, width and height.

Robert Reid • Family and Child Studies
Pauline Garcia-Reid • Family and Child Studies
Project C.O.P.E. – Year 3
US Department of Health & Human Services/SAMHSA
$283,875
Dr. Reid and Dr. Garcia-Reid’s five-year Project C.O.P.E. works to prevent substance abuse and the spread of HIV among African American and Latino youth in Paterson, NJ.

Stephanie Silvera • Public Health
Amanda Birnbaum • Public Health
Primary Prevention of Sexual Violence Program
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
$141,000
On this project, funded by a subaward from the NJ Department of Children and Families, Dr. Silvera and Dr. Birnbaum will serve as epidemiologists to help the Division of Women in developing their ability to create and use data moving forward and to develop a tracking system for state-level sexual violence indicators from publicly available data housed in various departments.

Dirk Vanderklein • Biology
Community Tree Inventory Pilot Study
NJ Department of Environmental Protection
$10,000
Montclair Township and MSU will collaborate on this project to create a cost effective and sustainable approach for the Township’s first the pilot tree inventory, and eventually the complete tree inventory for the community.

Jedediah Wheeler • Arts and Cultural Programming
Presenting & Multidisciplinary Works: To support three productions in the Women at Work Season, a series of artworks celebrating women in the performing arts
National Endowment for the Arts
$40,000
This award will support the creation and presentation of three multidisciplinary artworks with women as the central creative forces, along with related community and outreach activities. Focusing on a theater director, a choreographer, and a composer with very different esthetics, Peak Performances will use each work as a jumping-off point to have lively conversations about the evolving presence of women in leadership roles in the arts.

Meiyin Wu • Passaic River Institute
Evaluating the Success and Monitoring the Usage of Wildlife Crossing Structures
NJ Department of Environmental Protection
$1,500
This project will investigate and the usage and success of five wildlife tunnels in Bedminster, NJ. The tunnels were installed in 2015 to provide a safe pathway for amphibian species to migrate from one side of the road to the other in order to mate and lay their eggs in nearby ponds or vernal pools.