Featured Awards – July 2013

NASA awarded Mark Chopping (Earth and Environmental Studies, CSAM) a $22,001 supplement for “Forest and Shrub Mapping with MISR” which uses a geometric-optical model inversion approach to allow the large area mapping of forest and shrubs in grasslands. Dr. Chopping is using data from NASA’s Earth Observing System Multiangle Imaging SpectroRadiometer.

Anna Feldman (Linguistics, CHSS & Computer Science, CSAM) and Jing Peng (Computer Science, CSAM) were awarded $176,514 by the National Science Foundation for “RI: Small: RUI: AIR: Automatic Idiom Recognition.”  Idioms present great challenges for many Natural Language Processing applications, such as machine translation, automatic text summarization or sentiment analysis.  The goal of this research is to develop a language independent method for automatic idiom recognition.

The American Psychological Association awarded Jamaal Matthews (Educational Foundations, CEHS) $7,467 for “Classroom Processes and Academic Identity Formation: How Young Adolescents Come to Think of Themselves as Mathematicians in Urban Schools,” which will examine the role classroom social processes play within Mathematics identity formation during the first year of high school.

Bryan Murdock (Research Academy for University Learning) was awarded $1,000 by the Association of American Colleges & Universities for “The Community-Based/Participatory Action Research Think Tank.” In collaboration with the CUNY Graduate Center, the program will serve as a study/action team project where participants discuss their projects while learning more about the best practices and tenets of community-based/participatory action research.

Ruth Propper (Psychology, CEHS) received a $53,070 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program award for “Investigation of a Neurocognitive Biomarker and of Methods to Mitigate Biases in Cognitive/Perceptual/Emotional Processing.” It will fund the purchase of a neurocognitive monitoring system in support of a research program examining the predictive potential of a neurocognitive biomarker, investigating factors and conditions underlying emotional, cognitive and perceptual biases that impact negatively on spatial and memory task performance, and identifying techniques that mitigate the negative impact of biases on performance.

Rebecca Swann-Jackson and Eden Kyse (Center for Research and Evaluation on Education and Human Services, CEHS) and Lisa Lieberman (Health and Nutrition Sciences, CEHS) were awarded $10,000 by the NJ Department of Education for “Technical Assistance on Surveying Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Professionals in New Jersey.” CREEHS will provide survey development and analysis services to the Council for Young Children to inform the statewide mapping of educational, consulting and clinical professionals and agencies that can offer professional development, consultation and clinical services in the fields of infant and early childhood mental health.