Faculty Funding Wins
Recent Research Funding Awards
Drs. Justin Burton and Minsu Kim
Associate Professors of Physics
Drs. Justin Burton and Minsu Kim in the Physics Department were recently awarded a grant from the Keck Foundation to explore how microbes adapt to living in the Earth's atmosphere as well as the broader role that these organisms may play in the planet's ecosystem. This $1.2 million dollar award represents a huge win for these creative faculty members and for Emory College. For two deadlines annually, Emory University can nominate one proposal in the area of Medical Research and one in Science and Engineering. This Science and Engineering Grant awarded to Drs. Burton and Kim was one of only 11 awarded in this category in 2022. The Office of Corporate and Foundation Funding oversees the Keck nominations, including optional Concept Counseling calls to vet the proposed projects. The exciting, funded project builds on important work demonstrating the critical role of microbes in soil and marine environments, expanding to study airborne microbes. Evidence suggests that these airborne microbes can impact rainfall and crops, but broader effects have not yet been explored. The prototype acoustic levitation system that these scientists developed as well as collaboration with several colleagues with complementary expertise makes the proposed studies possible.
Recent Research Funding Awards
Dr. Justin Burton
Associate Professor of Physics
Drs. Justin Burton and Minsu Kim in the Physics Department were recently awarded a grant from the Keck Foundation to explore how microbes adapt to living in the Earth's atmosphere as well as the broader role that these organisms may play in the planet's ecosystem. This $1.2 million dollar award represents a huge win for these creative faculty members and for Emory College. For two deadlines annually, Emory University can nominate one proposal in the area of Medical Research and one in Science and Engineering. This Science and Engineering Grant awarded to Drs. Burton and Kim was one of only 11 awarded in this category in 2022. The Office of Corporate and Foundation Funding oversees the Keck nominations, including optional Concept Counseling calls to vet the proposed projects. The exciting, funded project builds on important work demonstrating the critical role of microbes in soil and marine environments, expanding to study airborne microbes. Evidence suggests that these airborne microbes can impact rainfall and crops, but broader effects have not yet been explored. The prototype acoustic levitation system that these scientists developed as well as collaboration with several colleagues with complementary expertise makes the proposed studies possible.
Dr. Minsu Kim
Associate Professor of Physics
Drs. Justin Burton and Minsu Kim in the Physics Department were recently awarded a grant from the Keck Foundation to explore how microbes adapt to living in the Earth's atmosphere as well as the broader role that these organisms may play in the planet's ecosystem. This $1.2 million dollar award represents a huge win for these creative faculty members and for Emory College. For two deadlines annually, Emory University can nominate one proposal in the area of Medical Research and one in Science and Engineering. This Science and Engineering Grant awarded to Drs. Burton and Kim was one of only 11 awarded in this category in 2022. The Office of Corporate and Foundation Funding oversees the Keck nominations, including optional Concept Counseling calls to vet the proposed projects. The exciting, funded project builds on important work demonstrating the critical role of microbes in soil and marine environments, expanding to study airborne microbes. Evidence suggests that these airborne microbes can impact rainfall and crops, but broader effects have not yet been explored. The prototype acoustic levitation system that these scientists developed as well as collaboration with several colleagues with complementary expertise makes the proposed studies possible.
Dr. Margaret (Maggie) Jones
Assistant Professor of Economics
Dr. Margaret (Maggie) Jones, who is an Assistant Professor of Economics, has been active in procuring extramural research funds to support her research program. Recently, she has obtained multiple collaborative research grants to support several different projects that all connect to her research questions, which focus on history, labour, and education, employing tools from these disciplines to better understand the persistence of socioeconomic inequalities between groups in North America with a particular focus on skill accumulation and discrimination. She has recently obtained funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Sciences and Engineering Research Network (NSERC) Emerging Infectious Diseases Modeling Initiative and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Altogether, these collaborative grants provide in excess of $1.75 million spanning a period from 2020-2023 to address the important questions that are the focus of Dr. Jones’ research through a variety of distinct, data-driven approaches.
Dr. Elena Cholakova
Director of Piano Studies in The Department of Music
Dr. Elena Cholakova, Director of Piano Studies in The Department of Music has obtained a grant from the Vaughan Williams Foundation (RVW) trust in the UK to support an exciting project. These funds will support a piano solo CD of newly commissioned music by women composers. Dr. Cholakova’s personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and her subsequent research into the topic drove home the fact that women's academic output and research suffered greatly during the pandemic, often because they became primary caregivers. To address this issue, Dr. Cholakova conceived the idea of commissioning women composers wanting to highlight their stories through the music they write. This is the first such project on the national and international stage and Dr. Cholakova is very excited to work with talented women composers such as Maya Miro Johnson, Alexandra Vrebalov, Lynne Plowman and fellow faculty member in the Emory Department of Music, Katherine Young. This particular grant will go toward commissioning a piece by Welsh composer Lynne Plowman.
Dr. Sameena Mulla
Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Dr. Sameena Mulla, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, has secured a new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to support research focused on evaluating civilian oversight of police departments. Her team is particularly interested in how civilian oversight equips itself to intervene into racist policing practices. This award will provide over $135,000 over the next three years to support team-based multi-sited ethnography to study and analyze locally specific features of these oversight commissions. With sites in San Diego, Milwaukee and Washtenaw Counties, the team will compare institutional structures, histories, local politics, and racial vernaculars. Understanding these features grounds the analysis of civilian oversight commissions as institutions that simultaneously provide avenues of accountability and reform, while reinscribing the power and influence of policing.
Dr. Kristin Phillips
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Dr. Kristin Phillips, who is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, has obtained new National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to expand her research on energy and poverty in East Africa into work on similar themes in the southeastern United States. This project, which provides in excess of $225,000 of support over the next three years, explores how disproportionate energy burden (spending more than 10% of income on energy costs) impacts low-income households in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and studies the significance of energy poverty in the struggle to secure housing and make meaningful homes. The project consists of ethnographic, archival, and qualitative research over a period of three years, asking several key questions: 1) How do low-income people use domestic energy and how do they understand the role of energy in making homes? 2) How does energy help and hinder people in meeting their basic needs? 3) What histories, issues, and factors shape energy affordability? And 4) how do utility politics and regulation impact low-income household members’ ability to pay electric bills?
Dr. Anita Devineni
Assistant Professor of Biology
Dr. Anita Devineni, Assistant Professor of Biology, recently obtained research funding from the prestigious Whitehall Foundation. The Whitehall Foundation has the overall goal of supporting research to better understand behavioral output or brain mechanisms of behavior. Dr. Devineni will receive a total of $300,000, $100,000 each year for the next three years, to support her research, which explores how neural pathways in the fruit fly brain process taste information to help make decisions about what to eat. The funded study takes advantage of genetic tools and detailed maps of brain cell connectivity that are available in the fruit fly to dissect the function of these neural pathways. Studying the fly taste system provides a model for understanding how the brain more generally processes and integrates different kinds of information.
Dr. Ali Ochoa Cohen
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Dr. Ali Ochoa Cohen, who is a new Assistant Professor of Psychology, arrives at Emory with an active National Institutes of Health (NIH) K01 grant consisting of $766,743 over the next four and a half years to support her research. This project, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), seeks to determine how reward states modulate lasting memories that can carry over to guide future behaviors from childhood to adulthood. The funded work has the potential to define cognitive and neural mechanisms through which rewarding experiences persist in memory across adolescence, which may provide insights into vulnerability to substance use disorders and ultimately inform possible interventions to support healthy development.
