2016-2017 EHE Seed Grant Awardees

The EHE Office of Research annual seed grant program supports the scholarly activities of its faculty and research staff by funding investigations that break intellectual ground and provide the foundation for additional proposal development. This year’s seed grant program required a collaboration between researchers in EHE and Arts and Sciences.


Lin Ding

Lin Ding

Lin Ding (Teaching and Learning) and Ian Krajbich (Arts and Sciences)

Discovery Through the Eyes of Problem Solvers: Using Eye-Tracking Technology to Explore the Mechanisms of Successful and Unsuccessful Approaches to Synthesis Physics Problems

This project is aimed at using eye tracking to study attention patterns of experts and novices as they solve novel synthesis physics problems. These problems involve multiple topics typically taught in different chapters and at various time points. Successful strategies for synthesis problems differ considerably from those for traditional physics tasks.

 


Leslie Moore

Leslie Moore

Leslie Moore (Teaching and Learning) and Monique Mills (Arts and Sciences)

Assessing Students’ Narrative Language: Emic and Etic Perceptions
The goal of the proposed exploratory study is to expand the empirical basis on which to establish best practices for assessing the narrative language of school-age Black students—a population which tends to underperform academically compared to Asian and White students. Although the factors that contribute to these educational disparities are complex and myriad, language skills form the bedrock of academic success.

 

 


Elaine Richardson

Elaine Richardson

Elaine Richardson (Teaching and Learning) and Wendy Smooth (Arts and Sciences)

Girls of Color as Social Change Agents: Identifying Pathways to Leadership

This project applies insights from political science, women’s and gender studies and girls’ empowerment studies to understand girls of color and their leadership aspirations. Using focus groups with girls of color ages 8-14, we seek to identify how girls of color respond to role models in politics with whom they share some demographic identity markers.

 

 


Ouliana Ziouzenkova

Ouliana Ziouzenkova

Ouliana Ziouzenkova (Human Sciences), Randy Nelson (College of Medicine) and Jonathan Parquette (Arts and Sciences)

Development of Nanoscaffold-Delivery of Insulin-Sensitizing Proteins to Target Diabetes

We propose to develop nanostructured protein scaffolds for the safe delivery of insulin and other proteins, such as epiregulin, shown to be capable of overcoming insulin resistance and obesity in our preliminary studies. The successful completion of this project will address a long-standing problem in achieving lasting treatment of chronic diseases with protein therapeutics.