2008 Salomon Awards

John Bodel, Professor, Classics and History;
Michael Satlow, Associate Professor, Religious Studies and Program in Judaic Studies: $19,800
Creation of a "Center of Digital Epigraphy" (CoDE)

Inscriptions are to students of ancient society what documents are to historians of more modern periods: essential primary sources. Their publication in print, however, has always been problematic and is becoming increasingly impractical. Brown has rich but scattered resources in the emerging area of digital epigraphy; a central administrative umbrella for projects in this area will facilitate cross-fertilization and will enable more efficient use of existing resources.  It will also establish Brown as a leader in the field nationally and, in certain respects, internationally.  For the first year, the Center will support two existing projects, “The U.S. Epigraphy Project” and “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine.”

Nitsan Chorev, Assistant Professor, Sociology: $15,000
From Smallpox to HIV/AIDS: On the Global Governance of Health

Health policies advocated by international organizations have rarely been based on biomedical knowledge alone. Rather, international health policies, like other international initiatives, reflect political considerations and economic calculations. Chorev’s proposed book project will offer the first comprehensive analysis of the political-economic dynamics underlying international health cooperation, from the establishment of the U.N. World Health Organization in the 1940s to the present. Drawing on an extensive original research, Chorev will examine how North-South relations, struggles among international organizations, and the rise of multinational corporations, private foundations and non-governmental organizations, affected the shifts in international health policies.

Deborah Cohen, Associate Professor, History: $15,000
Family Secrets:  The Rise of Confessional Culture in Britain, 1840-1990

Cohen examines the interplay between families and secrecy over the course of a century in a half in Britain.  Charting the shifting boundaries between what was considered private or shameful, and what could be freely disclosed, she makes two main arguments.  First, there is no straightforward story of progressive, enlightened de-closeting to be told; different family secrets had different trajectories.  Second, families did not simply enforce social norms.  Rather, they played a crucial role in arbitrating and even creating them.  Cohen’s grant will fund archival research in Britain.  Her book, “Family Secrets,” is under contract to Viking Penguin.

Sarah Delaney, Assistant Professor, Chemistry: $15,000
Elucidating the Roles of DNA Damage and Repair in Trinucleotide Repeat Expansion

The molecular basis for a family of neurological disorders, including Huntington’s disease and fragile X syndrome, is the expansion of a trinucleotide repeat region of DNA. These repetitive regions are known to form non-canonical secondary structures and, furthermore, recent work in mice has implicated DNA damage and repair in the expansion.  Delaney plans to study the mechanism by which the disease-initiating expansion occurs by unraveling the connections between secondary structure, DNA damage, and repair.  A molecular level understanding of how the expansion occurs will enable the design of agents to inhibit this process and consequently prevent a variety of neurological disorders.

Gerwald Jogl, Assistant Professor, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry: $15,000
Structural Biology of the Human Sir2 homolog, Sirt6, in complex with the Gcip tumor suppressor

Mammalian homologues of the yeast Sir2 histone deacetylase target a multitude of cellular proteins in addition to histones. These enzymes function as protein deacetylases or ADP-ribosyltransferases and have been implicated in processes such as chromatin regulation, DNA maintenance, and energy metabolism. They are considered promising targets for drug development against cancer and aging-related diseases. Human Sirt6 is a chromatin-associated protein, which is essential in DNA base-excision repair. Jogl’s research will attempt to determine the three-dimensional structure of Gcip (Grap2 and Cyclin D Interacting Protein) alone and in complex with Sirt6 to study the structure and function of their interaction.

Stratis Papaioannou, Assistant Professor, Classics: $14,600
Study, Edition, and Translation of the Writings of Michael Psellos (11th cent., Byzantium)

Prolific writer, ingenious courtier, and radical thinker, Michael Psellos (1018 - ca. 1078, Constantinople) represents Byzantine culture at a transitional moment. The eleventh-century is a time when across Europe a movement from premodern to modern cultural patterns is palpable, and Psellos, writing in Medieval Greek, is the earliest and most eloquent figure of this transition. Papaioannou has a comprehensive approach to his research on Psellos: he is completing a study of Psellos' aesthetics and autobiography, editing Psellos' letter-collection for the Teubner Series, and, in collaboration with an international team of scholars, he is preparing an anthology of Psellos' texts in English translation.

Sherief Reda, Assistant Professor, Engineering: $15,000
ProHunter: A Platform to Accelerate Protein Identification from Mass-Spectrometry Data

Mass-spectrometry based proteomics is a powerful technology for protein identification. One of the main challenges in this technology is the sheer volume of data that needs to be processed and analyzed. Despite the algorithmic advances in the last few years, mass spectrometry data analysis remains computationally challenging. Reda’s project will be the design and implementation of a new reconfigurable software/hardware platform that accelerates protein identification from mass spectrometry data using commodity hardware components. In addition to increased speed of computation (more than 1000x), the proposed platform will allow researchers to substitute bulky computer cluster nodes with a small inexpensive device running the same computations much faster and at a much reduced cost.

Deborah Rivas-Drake, Assistant Professor, Education: $15,000
An Examination of Changes in Ethnic Identity and Campus Engagement among Latino College Students Over One Year

Rivas-Drake’s research will examine the identity processes and academic and social adaptations of Latino students in higher education settings. One of her goals is to identify specific ways in which academic and social contexts inform Latino students' ethnic identity beliefs. She also seeks to identify the ways in which ethnic identity beliefs influence students’ decisions regarding how to spend their time in terms of academic work, extracurricular involvement, and recreational activities. Understanding changes in Latino students’ decision-making processes longitudinally will provide critical insight for programmatic efforts aimed at retaining such students in higher education.

Joseph Butch Rovan, Associate Professor, Music: $13,700
Studies in Movement

Studies in Movement pays homage to the great French physiologist and inventor Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). Marey analyzed, by means of non-invasive sensor systems and stop-action photography, the motion of humans and animals in the natural world. Rovan’s multimedia project, which includes musical composition along with the development of custom gestural interfaces of his own design, will reconsider Marey’s legacy by combining his words and images with new sounds and gestures. The material for the performance aspect of the project—text, music, and image—will draw on Marey’s considerable vision: technical writings, photographs, engravings, and the mysterious graphic tracings from a wide array of his uncommon writing machines.

Vivek Shenoy, Associate Professor, Engineering: $15,000
Mechanics of intracellular pathogens and biomimetic systems propelled by actin comet tails

A number of pathogenic bacteria responsible for diseases like listeriosis, meningitis and gastroenteritis hijack the protein machinery of the infected cells to form a filamentous actin comet tail that propels them within these cells and to other cells in their neighborhood. A physical understanding of the forces that lead to this motion can provide a means to control spreading of infections to healthy cells. Shenoy’s preliminary research has derived a dynamic model that provides a unified description of the seemingly unrelated trajectories of bacteria. The goal of his proposed work is to understand how macroscopic variables in the trajectories are related to molecular level properties of the actin filament network such as the statistical distributions of their lengths and orientations, degree of cross-linking and kinetics of polymerization.

Marcus Spradlin, Assistant Professor, Physics: $15,000
New Computational Methods in High Energy Physics

Spradlin's research has focused on the development of efficient new algorithms for performing otherwise formidable calculations in gauge theories such as quantum chromodynamics, which describes the strong nuclear force.  This project aims to put these theoretical advances to practical use by involving Brown undergraduates in building efficient and user-friendly computer software tools.  This project will lead to technology that would be of great benefit to the field, rendering feasible a number of important calculations in theoretical physics which are presently out of reach.

Tracy Steffes, Assistant Professor, Education: $15,000
A New Education for a Modern Age: School, Society, and State, 1890-1940

Steffes’ project explores the efforts of reformers to define a “new education” for modern, industrial society in the early twentieth century.   She will analyze the ways in which the organizational changes in schooling extended the reach and power of the school and the state over young people in new ways.  In taking a national approach and placing it within the broader context of American responses to modernity and American political development, this project offers a significant reinterpretation of educational development in this period which places the growing role of state authority and national policymaking at the center.

Daniel M. Weinreich, Assistant Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology: $16,000
The Genetic Basis of Adaptation to Novel Environments in Laboratory Microbial Populations

Since Charles Darwin’s observation that natural selection occurs whenever individuals
that reproduce more successfully transmit at least some reproductive advantage to their
offspring, theory has far outstripped data. Biological novelties often arise when an organism’s environment changes, but the genetic details of this process remain largely unknown. Weinreich’s proposal uses the bacterium Escherichia coli to test the importance of preexisting genetic variation when adapting to new environments. The theoretically most intriguing possibility is that mutants with lower than average fitness in their own environment have higher than average fitness in a new environment.