23 receive Salomon Faculty Research Awards

The program supports excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for faculty research projects deemed to be of exceptional merit.

The Office of the Vice President for Research has announced this year’s recipients of Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards.

This program was established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for faculty research projects deemed to be of exceptional merit. From 1995-99, the program was funded by the bequest of the late Richard B. Salomon, chancellor of the University. Brown has funded the continuation of the program since 1999.

Awards of up to $15,000 are made by the vice president for research in consultation with the provost and an ad hoc committee of faculty advisers in response to proposals submitted to the Office of the Vice President for Research. A total of $200,000 was awarded for 2003.

The recipients are:

Gastone C. Castellani and Nathan Intrator of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems. Their project is titled “Gene Expressional Network dynamics; from experimental data to gene-gene connectivity reconstruction.” This project entails data analysis and modeling of large scale genomic data, and includes data acquisition and database construction; statistical data analysis, and genetic network modeling.

Deborah Anne Cohen, History. Her project, “Household Gods; The British and their Possessions, 1851-1945,” examines the origins of consumer demand and the construction of the self in a period of industrialization and democratization.

Pedro Dal Bo, Economics, and Amy Greenwald, Computer Science. Their project, “The Power of Advice: Experimental Evidence on Correlated Equilibria,” is an interdisciplinary study consisting of lab experiments on “correlated equilibria” on humans.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Medical Science, and Cynthia Garcia Coll, Education, Psychology and Pediatrics, will work on a project titled “Understanding Sexual Differentiation: A New Paradigm for Psychology.” This collaboratin hopes to open new approaches for researchers who study emergence of sexual difference in early childhood.

Masako U. Fidler, Slavic Languages. In a project titled “Not Just a Mimicry: Sound Symbolic Expressions, Cognitive Representations and Discourse Functions in Czech,” Fidler will conduct research on sound symbolic expressions in Czech using a large database. The goal is to shed light on systems and functions of sound symbolic expressions in Czech.

Katharina Galor, Center for Old World Art and Archaeology, and Eileen Vote, Computer Science, received funds for a three-dimensional reconstruction of the water system at Qumran – the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Forrest Gander, director of the Creative Writing Program and professor of English and Comparative Literature, will conduct research on and will translate “La Noche,” or “The Night,” a book-length poem by 20^th century Bolivian visionary poet Jaime Saenz.

George E. Goslow Jr., Biology and Medicine, EEB. His project, titled “Underwater Locomotion of the Thick-billed Murre,” will further his research designed to clarify how the nervous and muscular systems of birds operate in a coordinated manner to drive the wings during flight.

Yan Guo, Applied Mathematics. His project aims to produce a new and flexible approach to the study of Botlzmann Equation, and to further apply and improve his energy method to solve the following problems: the inverse power law without an angular cut off; dynamics of collisional plasma; the Baliscu-Lenard Equation; fluid limits of the Boltzmann Equation.

David Konstan, Classics and Comparative Literature; Kurt Raaflaub, Classics and History; Kenneth Sacks, History, will conduct “Project Temenos: Cultural Exchange and Appropriation in the Mediterranean World.” Their work is a cross-disciplinary study of an essential period of antiquity that spans several centuries, involves three continents, and crosses significant linguistic and methodological boundaries.

Jeffrey D. Laney, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry. His project is titled “Physiological Dynamics of Cell-Type Switching.” His research hopes to understand how a cell exploits the process of Ub-mediated proteolysis to change patterns of gene expression and switch between alternate phenotypic states.

Rachel Morello-Frosch, Center for Environmental Studies and Department of Community Health. Her project, titled “Segregation, Social Inequality and Links to Disparities in Community Environmental Health,” will develop indices of social inequality, using indicators of residential segregation as well as wealth and income inequality, and will analyze their relationship to disparities in community environmental health across racial and class lines.

Marion Orr, Political Science. “Community Organizing and the Ecology of Civic Engagement” will examine communities where the Industrial Areas Foundation has been trying to change local public policy and elevate new issues. Orr will look at three IAF affiliates – a systematic analysis of convergent forces contributing to ecology of civic engagement.

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, Economics. His project, titled “The Measurement of Influence: Theory and Applications in Economics, Computer Science, and Personnel Management in Academic Institutions,” is based on the problem of measuring influence or impact based on information in data – scholarly publications, judicial decisions, patents and Web. His project will bring to bring economic methodology to bear on ranking problem.

Juan R. Sanchez-Esteban, Bio-Med, Pediatrics. His research is titled “Mechanotransduction and Lung Alveolar Differentiation.” The long-range goal of his work includes the understanding of cell and molecular mechanisms that transduce mechanical stretch signals into a lung differentiation program.

Peter Weber, Chemistry. In his project, titled “Rydberg fingerprint spectroscopy of Proteins,” he hopes to push a recently discovered technique to fingerprint molecular shapes into the regime of biological molecules. His ultimate goal is to develop the science and technology that would enable us to analyze and characterize the shapes of proteins.

Alan S. Zuckerman, Political Science. “The Social Contexts of Partisan Dynamics” is a continuation of his earlier work. He will examine two data sets – The British Household Panel Survey and the German Socioeconomic Panel Survey.