CAS research support programs address scholarly impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic changed many aspects of university life when it struck in March 2020, forcing research and scholarly activities traditionally associated with campus activities to pivot. While the virus brought research to a halt in many cases, it also renewed many researchers’ passion and direction for their work.
To address changes in the research landscape created by the virus and resulting lockdowns, MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences has reallocated funds to offer Strategic Research Initiative (SRI) programs to its faculty and students, creating a Faculty Seed Funding program and a Student Research and Scholarly Activity funding program.
CAS experienced an unprecedented number of extramural grant submissions in 2020, despite the significant challenges faced by university faculty throughout the year. The CAS Office of the Associate Dean for Research worked behind the scenes to help with proposals, aid in their development and push documents through to submission.
Giselle Thibaudeau, associate dean of research for CAS, said the programs provide funds to assist faculty and students “even in light of these challenging times when many efforts have been put on hold and negatively impacted by events beyond our control.”
“I am very happy and appreciative for these funding opportunities, made possible through the generosity of the College of Arts and Sciences Deans Office and the Arts and Sciences Advisory Board. I am also extremely proud of the efforts, resilience and world-class scholarly output of our faculty and students,” Thibaudeau said.
Through the Faculty Seed Funding 2021, CAS will sponsor several projects across the departments of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Geosciences, Mathematics and Statistics, Physics, and Sociology. Although the researchers investigate diverse topics in their work, many of them address, in their own way, pressing issues like disease control, misinformation and racism and injustice.
Faculty who received 2021 Faculty Seed Funding awards include:
Gombojav Ariunbold, Department of Physics and Astronomy: “A Prototype of a Novel Spatiochemical Imaging Microscope”
Sally Gray, Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures: “Against Specialization: The Argument for Arts and Humanities in Science found in Critiques of Kant’s Aesthetics, Anthropology, and Scientific Theory by Kleist, Goethe, and Schiller”
Sanna King, Department of Sociology: “Racial Injustice and Racial Apathy Among Youth and Young Adults in the American South and Southwest”
Margaret Ralston, Department of Sociology: “Intergenerational Support and Well-being: The Impact of Place on Midlife and Older Adults’ Relationships”
Jingyi (Catherine) Shi, Department of Mathematics and Statistics: “Developing Automatic Pipelines and Algorithms to Enable Rapid Learning of COVID-19 Publications”
Vaidyanathan Sivaraman, Department of Mathematics and Statistics: “Pure Meets Applied: Graph Theory in Network Science”
Kun Wang, Department of Physics and Astronomy: “Probing Plasmon-assisted Synthesis Reactions One Molecule at a Time.”
Associate Professor Sally Gray plans to use the funds to continue research severely impacted by Covid travel bans. The funding will enable her to acquire access to crucial primary sources to research how the founding of scientific thought over a century ago impacts our worldview today.
“We face a crisis in a distrust of natural science and a confusion between fact and belief alongside a resurgence of pernicious racism. My work on critiques of the Enlightenment-aged disciplines of the modern research university in Germany demonstrates how these problems are connected and how they may be addressed through a rethinking of scientific education. With the funding from this program, I will travel to the Free University of Berlin so that I can study their extensive collection of late 18th- and early 19th-century German literature and the secondary materials written about it. Without access to such materials, this research is not possible,” Gray said.
Through the Student Research and Scholarly Activity 2021 funding program, CAS is funding projects spearheaded by exceptional student researchers. A total of thirteen students received funding for projects focused on a range of topics such as aggression, environmental conservation, genetics, geosciences, pet ownership and sleep, photogrammetry, polymers and more.
Students receiving the Student Research and Scholarly Activity (SRSA) 2021 funding include:
Suzanne Amadi, Department of Psychology: “The Effect of Pain Tolerance Feedback on Human Aggression”
Allison Bohanon, Department of Geosciences: “Structural and Biological Analysis of Basalt Fractures in Steens Mountain, Oregon as an Earth Analogue for Mars”
Courtney Bolstad, Department of Psychology: “Dog tired: Does Daytime Engagement With a Pet Dog Impact Owners’ Sleep?”
Zachary Dykema, Department of Biological Sciences: “Correlating Caribbean Rock Iguana Genotype and Territory Quality Using Fecal Environmental DNA”
Nicholas Engle Wrye, Department of Biological Sciences: “Investigating Conserved Floral Scent as a Driver of Hybridization”
Chathuri Gamlath Mohottige, Department of Chemistry: “Effects of Biochar on Mycorrhizal Fungi Metabolism”
Angel Jimenez, Department of Geosciences: “Immobilization of Uranium by Calcium Phosphate Minerals”
Abby Jones, Department of Biological Sciences: “Linking Scavengers to Greenhouse Gas Emissions after Mass Mortality Events”
Blaklie Mitchell, Department of Biological Sciences: “Investigating the Influence of Hybridization on Fitness Among Iguana delicatissima”
Keri Porter, Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures: “The Application of Photogrammetry for the Recording and Analysis of Antemortem Cranial Depression Fractures”
Henry Reynolds, Department of Chemistry: “Removing Nitrates and Phosphates from Runoff and Baseflow using Low-cost, Engineered Biochar”
Ketki Shelar, Department of Chemistry: “A Modular Approach to Novel Corannulene-derived Novel Semifluorinated Polymers for Optoelectronics Application”
Max Wamsley, Department of Chemistry: “Towards Nanoscale Noninvasive Temperature Sensing.”
Amadi, a research associate and graduate student in the Department of Psychology, elaborated on how the SRSA funding will advance her academic goals: “I have accepted an American Psychological Association (APA) accredited postdoctoral position that requires a percentage of clinical research. This experience of developing and gaining a grant was a good introduction to granting writing for research. Acquiring grant writing skills and receiving this award will be beneficial to my career in an academic medical center. In addition, the grant will help facilitate my current dissertation project. For this, I am grateful,” she said.
Jimenez, a graduate student in the Department of Geosciences, will use her funding to research safer ways to dispose of radioactive waste. “I am currently working with the use of phosphate minerals as an alternative method for the safe disposal of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Information on phosphate minerals suggest that uranium, the main component in radioactive waste, can be incorporated into the crystal structure of these minerals. We also know that phosphate minerals such as apatite are insoluble and stable at our ambient conditions. Therefore, once we understand the incorporation pathways of uranium into phosphate minerals, we will have a thorough understanding of how radioactive material can be safely disposed of with this technique, potentially enabling the increased usage of nuclear energy which will help us transition away from our current contributions to the greenhouse effect,” she said.
Dykema, a graduate student in the Department of Biological Sciences, will use the funding to keep his doctoral work on schedule after experiencing setbacks from the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns. “Receiving money through SRSA allows me to get a jump start on establishing my dissertation lab protocols while I wait until I can travel safely to the Caribbean to collect my field samples. This should keep me on track with my original Ph.D. timeline,” he said.
Although the pandemic has significantly shifted the academic landscape, CAS faculty and students have shown resilience in continuing their endeavors as well as ingenuity to begin projects that tackle these new challenges directly.
MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences includes more than 5,200 students, 323 full-time faculty members, nine doctoral programs, 15 master’s programs, and 27 undergraduate academic majors offered in 14 departments. MSU is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a “Very High Research Activity” doctoral university, the highest level of research activity in the country. MSU is one of only 120 schools to hold the designation. For more details about the College of Arts and Sciences, visit www.cas.msstate.edu/. MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.