Ana Baylin, Assistant Professor, Community Health: $15,000
Genetic Modification of Triggers of Acute Myocardial Infarction

Baylin's overall objective is to identify genetic modifiers of triggers of acute myocardial infarction by examining genes involved in the beta-adrenergic pathway and the caffeine metabolism pathway. Using a novel case-crossover design, it has been established that heavy physical exertion and coffee are potential triggers of acute myocardial infarction. This study offers an unusual opportunity to expand our understanding of how genetic background can modify the triggering effect of transient risk exposures and will help us in identifying subgroups of individuals who may be more responsive to the adverse health effects of some triggers than others.

Richard J. Bennett, Assistant Professor, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology: $15,000
Genetic Epigenetic Variation in the Human pathogen Candida albicans

C. albicans is normally a commensal organism, living as a benign part of the microflora in the gastrointestinal tract. However, it is also an opportunistic pathogen and is capable of causing life-threatening systemic disease due to its ability to exist in many host environments. C. albicans has evolved adaptive mechanisms to populate and thrive in diverse niches, and Bennett's research focuses on the adaptations that have made it efficient at colonization and infection in the host. Bennett will focus on an epigenetic process that allows C. albicans to undergo a rapid and metastable switch in phenotype.

Wayne D. Bowen, Professor, Molecular Pharmacology, Physiological, and Biotechnology
Correlation of Sigma-1 Receptor Expression and Function with Indicators of Tumor Aggressiveness and Metastatic Potential: $15,000

This study focuses on the major contributor to cancer deaths: tumor metastasis. Recognizing that rapidly dividing tumor cells and cells that are highly motile have a greater chance for metastasis, Bowen will study Sigma-1 receptors. These receptors serve as ligand-regulated amplifiers of calcium signaling by enhancing the inositol triphosphate-induced release of calcium from the endoplasmic reticulum when agonist activation of G-protein coupled receptors stimulates phosphoinosite turnover. This study will utilize related breast tumor cell lines, MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231, which are weakly and strongly metastatic, respectively, and Bowen's sigma-1 overexpressing cells, Line 41. Bowen and his team will attempt to correlate the expression level of sigma-1 receptors to proliferative rate, sensitivity to mitogens, and changes in cell motility. The study could lead to use of sigma-1 receptor expression as a marker for metastatic potential and as a target for drugs that block proliferation by blocking the receptor.

Elizabeth J. Bryan, Associate Professor, English: $5,670
Vernacular Text Production in Medieval England and Spain

This project focuses on the emergence of early Middle English texts in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Bryan will investigate the possibility that the political relationships between Plantagenet monarchs of England and the royal houses of Castile in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries created a climate in which the "idea" of producing texts in vernacular languages, rather than in Latin, might have been mutually influential.

Caroline Castiglione, Assistant Professor, Italian Studies: $7,935
Extravagant Pretensions: Women and Family Conflict in the Public Sphere of Rome, 1650-1750

In early modern Rome, aristocratic family conflicts were negotiated by very public means: petitions, letters, trials, and new spheres of sociability, the "conversazioni." To the regret of some male contemporaries, women frequently reshaped popular opinion in their favor, and won the support of popes and papal magistrates. In Castiglione's project female and male viewpoints will be comparatively analyzed to further our understanding of how aristocratic Roman families survived and were influenced by such controversies. The study will also illuminate the origins of the greater freedoms women came to enjoy in the eighteenth century, the respective roles that women and men played, and the larger impact of such changes on the culture of early modern Rome.

John Cherry, Professor, Classics and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World: $15,000
The Vorotan Project, Southern Armenia: 2007 Season

Cherry's archaeological research explores the long-term human utilization of the Vorotan River corridor (Syunik marz, Republic of Armenia). The team's interests, encouraged by successful fieldwork in 2005 and 2006, revolve around the diachronic record of settlement and exploitation of this river course, and the strategic history of what has long been a recognized passageway for movement, contact, and exchange within the southern Caucasus. In 2007 Cherry will focus on four specific goals for fieldwork: 1) Regional connectivity and control, 2) Test excavations, ceramic study and architectural mapping, 3) Mortuary landscape analysis, and 4) Obsidian studies.

Jennifer Dworak, Assistant Professor, Engineering: $15,000
An Investigation of Pattern-Limited Test Sets for the Detection of Errors Caused by Random Defects, Systematic Defects, and Process Variations

Achieving adequate reliability of integrated circuits (ICs) is a critical problem facing today's semiconductor industry, especially as fabrication processes shrink below 90 nanometers to 65 and 45 nanometers and beyond. As feature sizes decrease systematic defects and process variations become increasingly significant. Dworak's research will explore the detection of systematic and random defects with test sets of limited size. This research will determine the degree to which defects can be detected on groups of ICs with varying defect and process variation characteristics as a function of test set length and quality.

Thalia Field, Assistant Professor, Literary Arts: $15,000
Experimental Animals

Using primary source materials, Field is researching a book entitled, Experimental Animals. Her work inhabits a territory where cultural/science history and innovative fiction overlap. Her passionate stories intertwine through various narrative "experiments," emerging into a portrait of science and aesthetics as they become increasingly specialized and bound together in the modernist imagination. This project brings together the historical root of the aesthetic term "experimental" and the cultural, scientific and ethical implications of vivisection as it mobilized the artists and scientists of thee 19th century.

Matthew Garcia, Associate Professor, American Civilization: $15,000
The Rise and Fall of the Farmworkers Movement: Race, Labor and Justice on the California-Mexican Border, 1940-1980

Garcia's study will explore the Farmworkers Movement from its formation to the purges and defections of key organizers and members of the United Farmworkers Union (UFW). This work focuses on the grassroots efforts of ordinary people, men and women, in the making of a social movement. This project seriously examines the successes and shortcomings of the movement so that we may understand the degraded status of workers who feed the nation and the world today.

Mark Johnson, Assistant Professor, Molecular Biology, Cell biology and Biochemistry: $15,000
How do gametes fuse? Identification of Egg-expressed Proteins Required for Sperm-Egg Fusion

Fertilization is of central importance to the life cycle of all sexual organisms, yet we know very little about the molecules responsible for the fusion of gametes. Using a genetic screen, Johnson has analyzed fertilization mechanisms in the flowering plant, Arabisppsis thaliana and identified a mutation, HAP2, a sperm-expressed gene essential for fertilization. The HAP2 gene encodes a membrane localized and sperm-specific protein. Johnson hypothesizes that HAP2 protein on the surface of the sperm interacts directly with proteins on the surface of the egg and that these protein:protein interactions mediate sperm:egg fusion. Johnson proposes to identify proteins that interact with HAP2 and are required for fertilization.

David Lindstrom, Associate Professor, Sociology and PSTC: $15,000
Migration and Marriage: Union Formation and Dissolution among Mexican Women in Mexico and the US

Using data which provides a unique bi-national, nationally representative pooled sample, Lindstrom examines the impact of U.S. migration on union formation and dissolution among Mexican origin women. The primary objectives of this study are: 1) describe the marital experiences of Mexican origin women in the United States and Mexico, 2) compare marital patterns for first and second generation Mexican immigrant women to non-migrant women in Mexico and native non-Hispanic white women in the United States, 3) identify the relative impact of migrant selectivity, time spent in the United States, and immigrant generation on the likelihood of entry into a union, type of union (marriage verses cohabitation), and union stability.

G. Tayhas R. Palmore, Associate Professor, Engineering: $15,000
Improving the Stability of Polymer-Based Batteries

This proposal seeks to evaluate the stability of polymer-bases batteries for energy storage recently developed in Palmore's laboratory. Palmore's team will fabricate battery prototypes and subject said prototypes to a fixed load for repeated cycles of recharging and discharging. The prototypes will be dismantled and their polymer composites evaluated for mechanisms of degradation (oxidation, leaching of components, dendritic growth) using a variety of spectroscopic and imaging tools (NMR, FTIR, UV-Vis, SEM, AFM, STM, and XPS). Once primary mechanisms of degradation are identified, Palmore will modify the polymer composites to circumvent these deficiencies.

James M. Russell, Assistant Professor, Geological Sciences: $14,850
Paleoclimate Changes and Tropical Glacier Dynamics in the Rwenzori Mountains, Uganda-Congo

Understanding the causes, magnitudes, and frequency of decade-to-century-scale climate variability is crucial to future climate prediction and the development of sound water resource management strategies in sub-Saharan African, yet out knowledge of these events remains rudimentary due to a lack of long, quantitative, high-resolution paleoclimate records. Russell will conduct fieldwork to recover sediment cores from six lakes in the Rwenzori Mountains, and will make laboratory investigations of the age, composition, and stratigraphy of those cores to understand climate variability and glacial history in this unique alpine ecosystem.

Hilary Silver, Associate Professor, Sociology and Urban Studies: $15,000
Explaining Neighborhood Change: The Case for South Providence

Silver's research examines whether Providence's redevelopment or local efforts mainly account for improvements and demographic changes visibly occurring on the South Side of Providence, and whether the improvements represent incumbent upgrading or gentrification. What is the impact of downtown redevelopment on low-income, minority neighborhoods? The answer is of practical as well as scholarly significance. Learning who benefits from urban economic growth obviously has implications for policy, but is also at the center of theories in the fields of urban planning, sociology, economics, and politics. Each discipline helps explain why neighborhood renewal varies across places.

Richard Snyder, Associate Professor, Political Science: $15,000
Does Lootable Wealth Breed Chaos? Natural Resources and Political Order in Comparative Perspective

With the main empirical focus of the project being the three Andean countries that are major producers of illicit drugs (Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru), Snyder will develop and test a novel theory of the contrasting political consequences of lootable wealth. Defining lootable wealth as high-value goods with low economic barriers to entry, Snyder argues that different types of institutions of extraction can be constructed on such goods -- with contrasting consequences for political stability. Within this political economy framework, Snyder will advance a more powerful theory of collapsed states and civil war, one that accounts both for disorder and order in the face of lootable wealth.

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Assistant Professor, Italian Studies and Comparative Literature: $15,000
A History of Italian Repression

Stewart-Steinberg's analysis of Italian culture that begins with 1900 and ends in the present day is centered on a kind of knot tied around the problem of repression, a term that she understands in two senses: as a political term, one that must ask the question of the factuality and the legacy of Italian fascism, but also as a term understood in its psychoanalytic sense, that is, as the creation of both an individual and a cultural unconscious. Stewart-Steinberg will argue that these two meanings of the term are inextricably linked. While, the relative lack of impact of psychoanalysis in Italy has been amply noted, the connection between this lack and the history of Italian fascism has not. In this study, Stewart-Steinberg proposes to investigate precisely this connection, which, she believes, is crucial to furthering our understanding of not only Italian fascism itself, but also of those cultural forces that produced it and then, in its aftermath, dominated the cultural landscape of Italy until the present day.