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Skidmore College
Grants at Skidmore College

Award Highlight

AWARD HIGHLIGHT: FOOD SYSTEMS INITIATIVE

The grant from the Henry David Thoreau Foundation entitled "Food Systems Initiative" (PI: Nurcan Atalan-Helicke) aims to build on the existing courses and community relations established by the Environmental Studies and Sciences Program. Through workshops, internships, year-long capstone projects and meetings with community partners, the grant aims to strengthen the College’s collaborations among faculty and staff interested in food systems and with community organizations addressing local food issues, and it will increase students’ ability to create environmental solutions to pressing contemporary problems. The College and the Environmental Studies and Sciences Program has built relationships with community organizations in the Capital District region of New York, including the Pitney Meadows Community Farm and Saratoga Farmers Market (Saratoga Springs, NY), Radix Ecological Sustainability Center (Albany, NY), Capital Roots (Troy, NY), and Soul Fire Farm (Petersburg, NY), where students completed internships and worked on capstones. The Food Systems Initiative will leverage these contacts and existing programming to provide undergraduates with holistic, direct experience working at the intersection of environment and food systems. It will offer them opportunities to work on local and regional world problems through collaborative work, intensive faculty mentoring and leadership development.

The Food Systems Initiative will achieve its goals by offering workshops on racial justice and food systems to environmental studies and sciences majors, coordinated by MDOCS, and on storytelling and ArcGIS storytelling. Students will have an opportunity to participate in field trips to nearby farms and community organizations and learn about sustainable agriculture and food systems initiatives. The grant will also provide faculty-student summer collaborative research experiences for two environmental science and two environmental studies students in summer 2022 to prepare publications from the year-long capstone projects. A student will also receive an internship award in summer 2022 through the grant funding to work on food justice issues with a local community organization.

AWARD HIGHLIGHT: CHINESE SPANIARDS: RACE, MIGRATION, AND REPRESENTATION IN CONTEMPORARY SPAIN

Chinese Spaniards is the first book-length study of representations by and about Chinese and Chinese-descendent communities in Spain. The coronavirus pandemic and the media’s focus on the strain’s origin in China has fueled anti-Chinese sentiment globally. This discourse perpetuates the “yellow peril” of the nineteenth century, which framed Chinese migrants as a threat to western civilization, and highlights the need for a continued critique of how Sinophobia continues to condition representations of Chinese and Chinese-descendent communities today. In Spain, the Chinese were once a relatively small migrant group, but the community’s size and its economic and cultural influence has grown significantly in recent decades and can no longer be considered peripheral to mainstream Spanish culture. Chinese Spaniards: Race, Migration, and Representation in Contemporary Spain studies how the depiction the country’s Chinese community complicates Spanish identity in the twenty-first century and links these representations to a longer history of racial discourse. The project analyses literary, visual, and cinematic texts to make two arguments. First, that transnational tropes associated with the Chinese—such as the fictional villain Fu Manchu—have been reimagined in Spain in ways that condition the reception of Chinese migrants. Second, it examines how a generation of Chinese Spaniards—including musician Chenta Tsai and illustrator Quan Zhou Wu—interrogate established notions of Spanish identity and play a central role in advocating for themselves and other marginalized communities. This project studies an ethnic community that has been generally overlooked by scholarship on race and migration in Spain, situating this research within a larger scholarly conversation about Chinese diasporas in the west.

AWARD HIGHLIGHT: THE PERICLEAN FACULTY LEADERSHIP PROGRAM

The Periclean Faculty Leadership Program (PFL)™ champions civic engagement in the classroom, on the campus, and in the community. Periclean Faculty Leaders create and teach courses in a wide variety of disciplines in the fine arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that address issues of social concern, enrich curriculum, and enhance student social interest and involvement. They promote civil dialogue locally through lectures, town hall meetings, and public events; and advance public scholarship nationally and internationally through publications and conference presentations. 

The Andrew W. Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) Program™ in the Humanities connects the humanities and liberal arts learning to challenges facing the wider campus community and society more broadly. In collaboration with community partners, Mellon Periclean Faculty Leaders (PFLs) create courses across the humanities that incorporate community-based projects addressing six grand challenges: Climate Change, Education Access, Immigration, Mass Incarceration, Race and Inequality, and Voter Engagement. Project Pericles provides a grant of $4,000 for each PFL to support these civic engagement activities on their campus and in their communities. 

Presidents and Provosts on each campus nominated faculty members with demonstrated leadership potential who can make significant contributions on their campuses and in their communities. Nominations were submitted in collaboration with one or more community partners, ranging from an abbess in a nunnery to the acting assistant commissioner from the department of corrections. Community partners provided enthusiastic letters of support, making the vision for these courses powerful. Academic experts serving as outside evaluators then reviewed all applications before final selections were made. As we look to an especially uncertain future, it is hopeful to see the potential impact that each PFL course will have on the students, faculty, institution, community, and higher education, more generally. Each course is an exciting opportunity for students, equipping them with skills to effect change when they graduate. 

This select group joins an earlier cohort of Mellon PFLs and expands our vibrant, national community of PFLs dedicated to incorporating civic engagement into the curriculum while empowering students to use their academic knowledge to tackle real-world problems. PFLs reflect together and inspire each other. As part of the program, PFLs share their pedagogical approaches, experiences, and evaluations with higher education, more generally, through scholarly presentations and publications. They have a tremendous influence on their colleagues on their campus and across the nation, exemplifying how the humanities are enhanced by meaningful campus-community relationships.

AWARD HIGHLIGHT: SCIENTIFIC EQUIPMENT PROGRAM

The Sherman Fairchild Foundation has awarded Skidmore a grant of $494,240 (PI Juan Navea and Co-PI Kimberley Frederick) in connection with the Foundation’s Scientific Equipment Program. Over the four-year grant period, 2020 to 2023, this grant will allow Skidmore to purchase a range of new scientific equipment — from a Raman microscope to an electron spin resonance spectrometer — to support inquiry-driven research and collaboration in Skidmore’s chemistry, environmental studies and sciences, health and human physiological sciences, biology, neuroscience and geosciences programs and beyond. The grant’s overarching goals originate from Skidmore College’s longstanding commitment to a rigorous liberal education with a creative and multi-disciplinary approach. In the natural science division, we seek to strengthen an academic program where students interweave the traditional disciplines of the natural sciences in order to understand the world around us. We strive for our students to become creative and well-informed scientists, using scientific evidence in their quest for knowledge. With the Center for Integrated Sciences under construction, the College is aiming to upgrade the scientific equipment that ultimately helps students garner a meaningful learning experience. Specifically, the grant will help us:

  1. facilitate the connections and integration across the disciplines in the natural sciences and beyond through the use of transformational instrumentation;
  2. expand the creative boundaries of student-faculty research collaboration by adding cutting-edge instrumentation that facilitates the exploration of new scientific frontiers; and 
  3. enhance the experience of our students by enhancing hands-on experience in the classroom, laboratory, and research spaces while inviting non-science majors to gain an appreciation and understanding of modern science.

All of the instruments we will acquire as a result of this grant are versatile and will be invaluable in our priority to invite non-science majors to understand the value of scientific measurements and motivate them to further develop their scientific literacy. The new scientific instrumentation will expand our data gathering and further enhance communication across the disciplines. It will also allow students to understand that data gathering is only a first step in scientific study, and that understanding requires rigorous data examination, careful crafting of hypotheses, and thoughtful dissemination. Ultimately, the equipment will help students to integrate and connect ideas from classrooms and laboratories across departments. It will provide them with invaluable tools to untangle challenges, enhance their independence, and find their way around the garden of forking paths that constitute our increasingly integrated world.

AWARD HIGHLIGHT: GLUCAN PHOSPHATASES AND REGULATION OF TRANSITORY STARCH METABOLISM

The goal of this NSF-funded research (Principal Investigator: Dr. Madushi Raththagala) is to understand how starch breakdown in plants is regulated at the protein level. Starch is the major carbon storage form of plants, a main source of calories in the human diet, and an important raw material for various industrial applications. Despite the importance of starch in biological systems and in human society, our understanding of the regulation of starch metabolism is surprisingly limited and far from complete. Transitory starch, a primary product of photosynthesis, accumulates in plant leaves during the day, and is degraded at night to provide energy for cellular activities and plant growth. Starch degradation is a complex process that requires the combined activity of several protein families including glucan phosphatases, glucan dikinases, and amylases. However, there are many unanswered questions regarding how these proteins specifically contribute to starch degradation. This research project will investigate the role that glucan phosphatases play in initiating and regulating transitory starch degradation. A complete understanding of the molecular events that control starch degradation is necessary to define novel strategies to improve starch yields in crops, a raw material for biofuel and various industrial and agricultural applications. Undergraduate researchers working on this project, some of whom will be from underrepresented and minority populations, will be provided the opportunity to engage in structural biochemistry and metabolomics research, travel to national conferences to present their work, and collaborate closely with experts in the field. Thus, this project will provide mentorship and training for the next generation of scientists and help retain both underserved and underrepresented students in the sciences. This research will also contribute to biochemistry undergraduate education through the design of a project-based laboratory course. Overall, the project represents a robust combination of advancing foundational research, improving undergraduate education, and positively impacting future agricultural and industrial applications.

MDOCS STORYTELLERS' INSTITUTE AND FORUM: CO-CREATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

The $25,000 grant from the Ford Foundation supports the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS), in particular the Storytellers' Institute and Forum. Founded in 2014, the annual MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute is a five-week residency hosted on Skidmore College’s campus. For the month of June, the Institute welcomes its Fellows to work on independent documentary projects and engage with the annual theme. The institute typically brings together professional documentary practitioners (Visiting Fellows), Skidmore College students, and Skidmore faculty and staff members (Skidmore Fellows) in an intellectually and creatively rigorous community. Our goals are to create a stimulating environment that fosters a connection between the Skidmore College campus and the greater documentary community. The Storytellers’ Institute offers Skidmore’s students, faculty and staff an opportunity to hone their documentary skills while being in community with high-level documentary practitioners who are at the forefront of their craft. Visiting Fellows are afforded the time, space, and resources to further their work in an intellectual and creative community that is deeply concerned with documentary ethics and theory, as well as craft. Our aim is that the Institute develops and broadens new ideas, in connection with the annual theme and documentary practice, and that it produces new knowledge and work that further pushes the bounds of creative practice and expression in the discipline of documentary.  Opportunities for public presentations of current or past work are offered to Visiting Fellows during the annual MDOCS Forum, a weekend of events grounded in the annual theme and its relationship to documentary practice. Occurring at the beginning of the Storytellers’ Institute, and drawing hundreds of documentarians, Skidmore community members and Capital Region residents, the Forum offers a chance for presenters and attendees to engage in lively and thought-provoking conversation and inspiration with the Institute’s Fellows and Forum presenters. These screenings, performances, and presentations are all free and open to the public. Aligning with our 2020 theme Co-creation and its Discontents, and the Ford Foundation’s priority to promote creativity and free expression by supporting “artist-driven projects and organizations that include deep and meaningful engagement with communities,” the Ford Foundation grant will specifically fund additional Visiting Fellows who are working in collaborative pairs and shorter residencies for artist collectives during the Storytellers' Institute and Forum.

INVESTIGATION OF NEUROPEPTIDE SIGNALING MECHANISMS THAT CONTROL SLEEP

Sleep disturbances are increasingly common and are associated with a variety of comorbidities and other public health consequences. It is therefore critical to improve our understanding of the neural mechanisms that control the timing and quality of sleep. Key signaling molecules that regulate sleep in animals ranging from flies to humans come from the family of neuropeptide transmitters. These molecules have sparse expression levels and selective effects on behavior, including sleep, making them prime candidates for the development of focused drug treatments with minimal side effects. However, the mechanisms by which these molecules act individually and in concert to regulate target cells in the brain and thus behavior are poorly understood. This proposal (Principal Investigator: Christopher G. Vecsey) will take advantage of the powerful genetics and relatively simple sleep network organization of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to address how neuropeptides function at the molecular, cellular, and behavioral levels to regulate sleep. This R15 AREA proposal will directly involve undergraduate students in all aspects of the research, including designing experiments, carrying out studies involving techniques of genetic manipulation, molecular and cellular neurobiology, and behavioral analysis. Their experiences will provide formative training for future careers in biomedical fields.

Dance to Success

Previous research sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts has reported on the relationship between arts engagement and at-risk youth. It was found that students with low socioeconomic status but with a high exposure to the arts demonstrate higher college enrollment and show improved academic achievement than their non-arts-exposed peers. The Dance to Success program (PI: Sarah DiPasquale) is designed to improve student learning outcomes by means of making high-quality dance accessible to public-school teachers in districts with high rates of student socioeconomic disadvantage. Dance to Success provides teachers with web-based access to 3-5 minute dance videos, consisting of original, brain-based movement geared to promote body-mind connectivity and improve student focus. Teachers are asked to utilize the dance videos with their students before every assessment given and, additionally, as ‘brain breaks’ as they see fit throughout the school day. Skidmore College students create the videos on campus as part of the program’s pre-college overlay. The aim of Dance to Success is to demonstrate the importance of dance and movement integration in public-school education through quantitative analysis of state and local assessment scores, reading levels, behavior referrals, and attendance as compared to a control group of nonparticipating classrooms. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment of teacher, student, and parent perceptions will allow for additional insight into the program. To our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind to both quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the use of dance in relation to student achievement and, more specifically, the relationship between dance exposure and at-risk youth.

Characterization and Modulation of SH3 Domain Binding Pathway Biophysics

The goal of this NSF-funded research (Principal Investigator: Dr. K. Aurelia Ball) is to understand how common protein binding interactions can be tuned in small ways to perform specialized functions in different cellular contexts. The communication within cells that allows cellular processes to occur is mediated by interactions between proteins. Understanding the details of these interactions, including their strength and specificity, will allow researchers to predict and modify the many types of cell behavior. Results will provide deeper insights into how protein binding interactions function in different cellular contexts and help explain how a common interaction can specialize to perform many different cellular functions. Undergraduate students working on this project will have the opportunity to learn both computational and experimental biophysics skills, including how both computational and experimental data can contribute to a project to form a more complete model of protein interactions. Students will also work closely with scientists at Texas Tech University (Mike Latham) and the University of Liverpool (Elliott Stollar) and experience first-hand the importance of collaboration to the modern scientific process. To allow a larger number of students to have an experience with undergraduate research, a research-based lab course will expose students to techniques in computational biophysics and molecular dynamics simulations. In this course, students develop and carryout a research project contributing to the larger project goals. This project also includes the development of a one-credit course for science majors on women and underrepresented groups in science. This course will be geared toward all natural science majors, and will encourage students navigating a major where women are traditionally underrepresented to consider and grapple with ideas about identity in science. Topics will include the challenges that women and minorities may face regarding identifying as scientists, stereotype threat, and impostor syndrome. The course will prepare students to be leaders on the topic of underrepresented groups in science and include a service-learning project.

Teagle Foundation - February 2019

In February 2019, the Teagle Foundation awarded Skidmore College and Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) a three-year grant of $300,000.  The grant allows Skidmore and SEO to continue their partnership in College-Community Connections, a collaborative program aimed at helping high-school students from New York City to prepare for, and succeed in, college.