Faculty receive grants for summer research projects

May 7, 2010 | Research, UToday
By Vicki L. Kroll



What faculty will do this summer: Assess the rhetoric of religion, study how preschoolers use science language, identify similarities in successful criminal investigations, build a research collaborative to win federal grants.

The UT Research Council has selected 22 faculty members to receive grants from the University Research Awards and Fellowship (URAF) Program and the deArce Memorial Endowment Fund in Support of Medical Research and Development.

“The University provides funding for these internal grant programs so that faculty from all disciplines can advance their scholarly efforts,” said Dr. Frank Calzonetti, UT vice president for research and development. “By supporting faculty research, scholarship and creative activity, the University provides needed funds so that faculty members can devote time to their projects and make contributions to their disciplines and to society. The Research Council members spend many hours reviewing proposals prior to deliberations to select the top proposals for funding from the many received from across the University.”

Recipients of URAF grants and their projects are:

• Dr. Alessandro Arsie, assistant professor of mathematics, “Dynamical Systems of Lax Type, Integrability and Applications”;

• Dr. Doina Chichernea, assistant professor of finance, “Idiosyncratic Risk, Investor Base and Returns”;

• Dr. Mai Dao, assistant professor of accounting, “Does Long Auditor Tenure Matter to Accounting Conservatism if a Strong Audit Committee Is Present”;

• Dr. Kevin Egan, assistant professor of economics, “The Design of Non-Market Valuation Surveys to Collect Revealed Preference and Stated Preference Data Without Invoking the Weak Complementarity Condition”;

• Dr. Florian Feucht, assistant professor of educational psychology, “High School Students’ Epistemic Beliefs About Written News”;

• Dr. Christina Fitzgerald, associate professor of English, “A Masculine Taste for Morality: Merchants, Moral Poetry and Manuscript Culture 1400-1600”;

• Cornel Gabara, assistant professor of theatre, “In-Depth Study and Translation of Kristin Linklater’s ‘Freeing the Natural Voice’”;

• Dr. Yong Gan, assistant professor of mechanical, industrial and manufacturing engineering, “Design and Fabrication of Biophotofuel Cells With Nanoporous Array Structures”;

• Dr. Timothy Geiger, associate professor of English, “‘13×13’: A Letterpress-Printed Chapbook of Poetry From Photopolymer Plates”;

• Dr. Rashmi Jha, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, “Inorganic-Organic Nano-Heterojunction Photovoltaic Device”;

• Dr. Richard Johnson, assistant professor of criminal justice, “Identifying Correlates of Successful Fugitive Investigations”;

• Dr. Joan Kaderavek, Distinguished University Professor of Early Childhood, Physical and Special Education, “Preschool Science Assessment: Children’s Use of ‘Science Language’”;

• Tom Lingeman, professor of art, “Rediscovering the Wheel: Integrating the Sculptural Processes of Metal Casting, Metal Fabrication, Ceramics and Stone Carving as a Means of Creating Metaphors for Our Endangered Planet” (click here to read more);

• Dr. Sonmez Sahutoglu, assistant professor of mathematics, “On Compactness and Localization of Hankel Operators”;

• Dr. Barbara Schneider, associate professor of English, “The Rhetoric of Religion and Retreats”;

• Dr. Sujata Shetty, assistant professor of geography and planning, “Confronting Shrinkage: The Planning Challenge for Toledo, Ohio”;

• Dr. Celia Williamson, professor of social work, “Building a Research Collaborative to Win Federal Grants”; and

• Dr. Kana Yamamoto, assistant professor of chemistry, “A New Strategy for Green Amide Bond Formation.”

Recipients of grants from the deArce Memorial Endowment Fund and their projects are:

• Dr. Malathi Krishnamurthy, assistant professor of biological sciences, “Role of Small RNAs in Innate Immunity”;

• Dr. Guofa Liu, assistant professor of biological sciences, “The Role of MicroRNAs in Axon Guidance”;

• Dr. Song-Tau Liu, assistant professor of biological sciences, “Probing Molecular Mechanisms of the Metaphase-to-Anaphase Transition Using Human Mitotic Cell Extracts”; and

• Dr. Hermann von Grafenstein, associate professor of medicinal and biological chemistry, “Role of Binding Interface Water Molecules in the Conformational Dynamics of MHC-Bound Peptides.”

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