Representative Research Grants
These grants were chosen to illustrate interdisciplinary or multi-institutional activities, or research that has immediate educational or societal impact. If there is a grant that meets these criteria that should be added, or if you have a comment, please contact us.
When available, abstracts of awards are provided.
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Area Studies |
National Resource Center: South
Asia Center
Digital
Dictionaries of South Asia, Phase II
South Asia Language
Resource Center
Education
Nye, James H.
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The Division of Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine |
Optimizing Heart and Brain Cooling during Cardiac Arrest
Lance B. Becker (Principal Investigator)
Terry Vanden Hoek (UofC)
Ken Kasza (Argonne)
This project of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab aims to develop an intra-arrest cooling system for field use by paramedics during cardiac arrest, a proposed new resuscitation method. Unlike any existing method, paramedics could use this cooling method after failed defibrillation in efforts to delay additional heart and brain damage until full reperfusion can occur.
MD/PhD Program in Medicine, Social Sciences and Aging
NIH Grant: 1T32AG023496-01
Meltzer, David O.
The goal of the program is to provide trainees with the skills they will need to pursue successful academic careers, produce high quality research, and provide leadership at the interface of medicine, the social sciences, and aging. To accomplish this goal, the program will provide training in medicine (leading to an MD), in the social sciences (leading to a Ph.D. in a social science or related discipline), and rich interdisciplinary training in both aging and health services research. Ph.D. training will be offered in Economics, Psychology, Sociology, Public Policy, and Social Service Administration. Interdisciplinary training will cover key concepts and methods in aging and health services research. (Supported by the National Institute on Aging.)
Bioterrorism: Molecular Analysis and Intervention [Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence, GLRCE]
NIH Grant:5U54AI057153-02
Schneewind, Olaf (Principal Investigator),
Related story on the H.T.Ricketts Biocontainment Laboratory
Modern science has created opportunities for a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary understanding of infectious diseases with the possibility of eradicating the threats of an entire class of bioterrorist agents. The Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence (GLRCE) was formed to achieve this goal because no one group, and no one institution, had the full armamentarium of expertise necessary to ask the questions in a meaningful and comprehensive manner. The immediate goal of its research activities is the development of therapeutic, vaccine and diagnostic products in collaboration with industry, thereby protecting Americans against possible future bioterrorist attacks. The Midwestern RCE is a consortium of fourteen institutions in Region V, encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. The consortium includes more than sixty investigators with expertise in biochemistry, chemistry, computer science, clinical infectious disease, engineering, immunology, mathematics, microbiology, medicine, nanotechnology, pharmacology, public health, structural biology or vaccine research at Argonne National Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute, Illinois Institute of Technology, Mayo Clinic, Medical College of Wisconsin, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Notre Dame University, Purdue University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. In addition to research on biodefense products, the GLRCE provides a network of expertise, education and laboratory infrastructure that serves the nation during bioterrorist emergencies. (Supported by the national Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.)
Proteomic Development of Molecular Vital Signs: Mapping a Mitochondiral Injury Severity Score to Triage and Guide Resuscitation of Hemorrhagic Shock
Terry Vanden Hoek, et. al.
The goal is to develop new methods for diagnosing hemorrhagic shock severity using a mitochondrial injury severity score (MISS) assay. Such an index would assess the degree of mitochondrial damage during hemorrhage, predict further post-resuscitation injury, and serve to triage and guide resuscitation. Assays for medics in the field and investigators in the laboratory could better measure this impact, and decrease the time to discover new resuscitation strategies.
A multi-disciplinary/multi-institutional team with ongoing expert consultation and a unique translational training program that attracts highly skilled senior and junior physicians/scientists will be established involving cientists from the University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and Argonne National Laboratory. The project will help attract the brightest and best physicians and scientists to careers committed to decreasing trauma casualties.
Neuropsychopharmacology training for drug abuse research
NIH Grant
T32 DA007255
Vezina, Paul R.
The overall objective of the Drug Abuse Research Training Program at The University of Chicago is to provide both pre- and postdoctoral trainees with comprehensive educational and research experiences that will enable them to pursue distinguished research careers in areas impacting drug abuse. Drug abuse poses a serious threat to the health and well being of both individuals and society. Mental status, physical health, social function and economic productivity are compromised.
The aim is to increase our understanding of the etiology of and our ability to intervene in the treatment and prevention of drug abuse. Specific strengths of this program relate to the neuropharmacology, psychopharmacology and molecular biology of drug abuse as well as the behavioral and subjective effects of drugs in humans.
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Graduate School of Business |
Gender and Competition: Do competitive environments favor men more than women?
NSF Award: 0318378
Uri Gneezy (Principal Investigator)
Although women have made huge strides in catching up with men in the workplace, a gender gap persists both in wages and levels of advancement. Commonly cited explanations for this gap range from charges of sex discrimination to claims that women are more sensitive than men to work-family conflicts and thus less inclined to make sacrifices for their careers. We suggest that another factor may be at work: a deeply ingrained difference in the way men and women react to competition that manifests itself even at an early age. The main conclusion from the findings so far is that females tend to be far less responsive to competition than males--a tendency with important implications. If the gap is affected by the nature of the task and the stereotypes, then the policy implications of the findings should be refined. For example, when considering a single sex classes, should it be only for math where the stereotype is that boys are better, or also for literature in which the stereotype is that women are better.
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The Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies |
Program for Urban and Community Leadership
Edward T. Lawlor, Robert H. Michael
In 2002, with the generous support of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, the University of Chicago launched a new initiative to focus the extraordinary intellectual resources of the university's faculty and students on the issues confronting Chicago and other urban communities. The Program for Urban and Community Leadership seeks to attract students of the highest quality to the field of urban policy and community development; to provide those students with exceptional training that will prepare them to address both current problems and future challenges; and to develop new approaches to urban issues through faculty research.
Based jointly in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the School of Social Service Administration, the Program will draw on the unique strengths and interests of each school to address in an integrated fashion the needs and potential of Chicago and its citizens. It will develop a cadre of highly skilled and thoughtful leaders to guide Chicago in future decades
Emotions Matter: Classroom-based Integrated Intervention
NIH Grant: 1R01HD046160-01
Raver, C Cybele (Principal Investigator)
The principal aim of this research is to improve low-income preschool-aged children's school readiness by decreasing their risk for behavioral problems through a set of classroom-based interventions. In short, which intervention approache represents the best investment in young children's chances for later school success? Which offers the largest long-term benefits to young children's emotional and behavioral adjustment and later school readiness? These studies will answer these pressing empirical questions using direct assessments of children's emotional and behavioral adjustment, language and pre-literacy skills.
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The Division of the Humanities |
Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project
New, Nov. 2006 Important hidden, yet historical collections in Chicago will be revealed during the next three years through the Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project. The project aims to improve access to two groups of collections at the University of Chicago, in addition to archives at the DuSable Museum of
African-American History, the Chicago Defender, and the Vivan G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History & Literature located in the Woodson Regional Library. At the University, the project will include the contemporary poetry collections and the Chicago Jazz Archive.
The UNCAP builds and expands Mapping the Stacks, an archival project that Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor in English Language & Literature and the College, created and has been directing since 2005.
New Perspectives on the Disciplines: Comparative Studies in Higher Education
Mellon Foundation
Chandler, James K.
Ways of Communicating in the Early Islamic World: Trade, Polity, and Intellectual Exchanges
National Endowment for the Humanities
Donner, Fred M.
(Abstract not available.)
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Oriental Institute |
Settlement Systems Within a Dynamic Environment and Economy: Contrasting Northern and Southern Mesopotamian City Regions
NSF Award: 0216548
Tony Wilkinson (Principal
Investigator)
John Christiansen (Argonne National Laboratory, Co-Principal Investigator)
The early urban settlements in the Near East provide an ideal laboratory for the study of long-term human-environment interactions because they offer an enormous array of archaeological and textual data that can be incorporated into an overall social, economic, and environmental analytical framework stretching over several millennia. This research project will model and attempt to explain trajectories of development and demise of Bronze Age settlement systems for both the rain-fed and the irrigated zones of modern-day Syria and Iraq. The project goals are to develop a holistic, dynamic, object-based model that can help determine the conditions under which societies became more or less urban or even collapsed. The investigators will examine why third and fourth millennium B.C. cities in the irrigated zone of southern Mesopotamia grew to a greater size and complexity than those in the rain-fed north. The simulated settlement system will be validated against the archaeological landscape as it has been recorded by field surveys and satellite remote sensing.
By the end of the project, investigators expect to have developed a general modeling framework with an associated user interface that will enable interactions between humans and the environment to be rigorously tested over periods as long as several millennia. The expected result of this work, improved understanding how humans interact with dynamic ecological and climatic mechanisms, is fundamental to ecological management and is applicable very broadly. In addition, studies of the interplay of coupled human and natural systems as a cause of collapse of past societies are also of fundamental importance. This project will provide new insights into the complex interactions between people and their environment, and it will contribute to the study of urbanization past and present.
The proposed modeling framework also has potential utility as an educational tool, because it will enable both academic and general users to interact with complex environmental, cultural, and socio-economic databases in order to simulate the growth of settlements and cities and to analyze long term concepts of sustainability.
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The Division of the Physical Sciences |
OCI: Collaborative Research: Community Driven Improvement of Globus Software
NSF Award Number 0534113
Ian Foster (Principal Investigator, UofC and Argonne National Laboratory)
Carl Kesselman (Co-Principal Investigator, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI)
This collaborative project promises generally to respond to the needs of the scientific user community in adding enhanced functionality and performance to an existing and well-used software base exceeding 2.5 million lines of code. The proposal included 102 letters of support, including letters from most of the significant grid-related projects worldwide. Continued support and new development of Globus will support and further enable existing distributed environments, as well as smooth the way for new grid environments to form in the support of distributed science, engineering, and education.
ITR: The GriPhyN Project: Towards Petascale Virtual-Data Grids
Paul R. Avery (U of FL) (Principal Investigator)
Ian Foster (UofC) (Co-Principal Investigator)
The goal of this project is to provide the Information Technology (IT) advances required for petabyte-scale data intensive science in the 21st century. Driving the research are unprecedented requirements for geographically dispersed extraction of complex scientific information from very large collections of measured data. To meet these requirements, the GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network) team of seven IT research groups and four frontier physics experiments will pursue IT advances centered on the creation of Petascale Virtual Data Grids (PVDG). Only PVDG technology can meet the data-intensive computational needs of a diverse community of thousands of scientists spread across the globe.
GriPhyN's physicists (the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)) are about to enter a new era of exploration of the fundamental forces of nature and the structure of the universe. The scale of this task far outpaces our current ability to manage and process data in a distributed environment, demanding fundamental IT advances. The benefits of this project will not be unique to physics, but will also apply to problems in biology (e.g. the human genome project), the environment (e.g. the Earth Observation System), and many other areas.
SciTech/Chicago Internships on Museum Presentations of Science
NSF Award: 0324457
Leo Kadanoff (Principal Investigator)
Morris Fred (Co-Principal Investigator)
This award, under the MPS Internships in Public Science Education Program, will support a collaboration between the University of Chicago and SciTech Hands-On-Museum to present science research and basic science to a broad public. The project will involve students and faculty from the University of Chicago and scientific and technical staff at SciTech Hands-On-Museum (Aurora, IL). Graduate students from several disciplines will be trained in and participate in the presentation of scientific knowledge, especially the conceptual design of museum exhibits. They will develop and implement projects and exhibits for SciTech. Ideas for projects will come from research work being performed at Chicago. Programs at Chicago that will help the students with projects include the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, the Center for Cosmological Physics, the High Energy Physics group and the Computation Institute. Information about the exhibits and evaluation results will be disseminated via a web page, presentations to an advisory committee and through national and international conferences.
Designing and Building a National Middleware Infrastructure: Towards a National GRIDS Center
Carl Kesselman (University of Southern California) (Principal Investigator)
Ian Foster (UofC) (Co-Principal Investigator)
Randal L. Butler (Co-Principal Investigator)
Philip M. Papadopoulos (Co-Principal Investigator)
The proposal focuses on designing and building the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI), and will be one of two System Integrators. The NMI program will expedite the development of middleware functions and services to support the national research and scientific community, and willalso accelerate the deployment and use of new and emerging applications across the Internet. The proposal will be based on an open extensible architecture by building on the success of the GRID activities (primarily Globus, the de facto standard for Grid environments,) and other middleware technologies.
REU Site: Summer Research Projects in Contemporary Physics for Women and Minorities
Sidney Nagel (Principal Investigator)
Young-Kee Kim (Co-Principal Investigator)
NSF Award: 0353854
The University of Chicago Department of Physics administers a Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) site project targeted especially towards encouraging members of under-represented minority groups and women to pursue careers in physics. Applications are solicited nationally from undergraduate programs in physics and engineering with some emphasis on historically black colleges and traditional women's colleges. The core of the program for each student participant is a 10-week summer research project under supervision of an individual faculty member. Each student is given a specific, well-defined research task that can be completed within the 10-week duration of the program. Typical projects are distributed among the areas of high-energy, cosmic-ray and space physics, astronomy and astrophysics, general relativity, condensed-matter physics, non-linear and non-equilibrium phenomena, optics and solar energy, biophysics and electron and ion microscopy. These research experiences are complemented by field trips to Argonne and Fermi Accelerator Laboratories. In addition, each summer, a series of lectures is presented by faculty to provide an overview of some of the most important research topics currently pursued in physics.
By having pre-college science teachers participate in our lecture series, we believe we can broaden our scope and introduce some of the ideas of cutting-edge research into high-school science classrooms. Each of the students submits a written report describing her or his research and makes a formal oral presentation during the last two weeks of the program. The Physics REU provides the students with an exposure to the breadth and unity of physics. In addition it provides the activities that bring all of the REU students into contact with one another to create the peer interactions among students that increase the program's excitement and vitality. We are enhancing the program by taking advantage of the excellent rapport we have observed between the REU participants and our graduate students. This will increase the feedback that we can get about the program as well as provide increased mentoring by role models close in age to the undergraduates.
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
Bruce Winstein (Principal Investigator)
The University of Chicago will devote $7.5 million in donations from Fred Kavli and the Kavli Foundation of Oxnard, Calif., to studying some of the most puzzling scientific questions about the origin and evolution of the universe and the laws that govern it. The funds will make permanent the Center for Cosmological Physics, established in 2001 by the National Science Foundation. The center will be renamed the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. The new institute is one of seven being established by Kavli around the country and in Europe on brain science, nanoscience and cosmology.
More than 90 scientists and students at the new Kavli Institute carry out research that fuses cosmology with particle physics. Of particular interest to the institute's researchers are the following questions: why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate, did the universe begin in a burst of expansion called inflation, and did a single unified force influence the beginning of the universe?
Center for Cosmological Physics
Bruce Winstein (Principal Investigator)
NSF Award: 0114422
The Center for Cosmological Physics brings together astronomers and physicists, experimentalists and theorists, to address the most fundamental questions in modern cosmology. It establishes an interdisciplinary environment essential to address the cross-disciplinary problems, thereby fostering an ideal climate for nurturing new talent (students and postdocs) and stimulating faculty and other senior scientists to think in different directions. Measurements of the remnants of the early universe will be performed by Center scientists; this data will be interpreted by them and center theorists to reconstruct the conditions and laws in effect at the earliest moments of the Universe. Experiments in Cosmology over the past decade have revealed phenomena which are simply not understandable in our "Standard Models." Thus they constitute important clues to the deepest secrets of nature. These include the fact that most of the matter in the Universe is "dark" and appears to only interact gravitationally; that most of the energy in the Universe is of a mysterious form whose dynamics is totally unknown; that points on the sky which have apparently never been in contact with each other have the same temperature to very high precision; and that there are particles striking the Earth with energies well beyond what we can understand. The Center exploits the interrelations among these phenomena and will address them with new experiments and new insights.
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The Division of the Social Sciences |
Cyberinfrastructure for Collaborative Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
NSF Award: 0537849
Bennett Bertenthal (Principal Investigator, UofC)
C. Sue Carter (Co-Principal Investigator)
Stephen Porges (Co-Principal Investigator)
Robert Grossman (Co-Principal Investigator
Rick Stevens (Co-Principal Investigator, U of C and Argonne National Laboratory)
This project will develop tools for collecting and analyzing human behavioral data on an unprecedented scale and level of sophistication. In their "SuperLab," the multidisciplinary team of researchers will be able to track human behavior in both individual and group settings, while collecting exquisitely detailed data on the participants in real time. These data, in turn, will help the Chicago group address research questions that far exceed the capacity of any laboratory today. How is social behavior correlated with the participants' neural activity, for example? How is it connected with their movements, postures, gestures, facial expressions and speech--or for that matter, their state of development, environmental context and cultural norms? Central to the Chicago group's effort will be the creation of a distributed data warehouse known as the Social Informatics Data Grid (SID Grid): a piece of cyberinfrastructure will encourage data sharing and accelerate the development of standards for collecting and coding physiological and behavioral data. The SID Grid will be deployed as part of the larger TeraGrid, a suite of grid computing resources available to the scientific community at large.
The Chicago group will develop, test, and refine their data collection and analysis tools through research in three areas of inquiry: multimodal communication, neurobiology of social behavior, and cognitive and social neuroscience.
MD/PhD Program in Medicine, Social Sciences and Aging
NIH Grant: 1T32AG023496-01
Meltzer, David O.
Please see entry under Biological Sciences, Health, and Medicine
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The School of Social Service Administration |
Risk Factors for Problem Behaviors of Asian Youth
NIH Grant: 1K01MH069910-01
Choi, Yoonsun (Principal Investigator)
The United States has seen a rapid growth in Asian American families in recent years, but little is known about the mental health of Asian American youth. The few studies of Asian youth present an unclear picture. Some studies suggest that these youths are disproportionately engaged in problem behaviors, such as street gang membership and violence, while others demonstrate healthy adaptation and adjustment. This mixed picture could be the result of methodologically inadequate studies such as the use of non-representative samples.. .. Our lack of understanding of these important issues calls for improved research on Asian American youth.
Knowledge generated from this study and future studies by the candidate can lead to the development of culturally appropriate, thus more effective, interventive strategies that reduce problem behaviors and enhance resiliency among Asian American youth and subgroups.
Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research
NIH Grant: 1P50ES012382-01
Sarah Gehlert, Principal Investigator
Conzen, Masi, McClintock, Olopade (Co-Investigators)
The specific aims of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research are to: Aim #1: bring together scientists from inside and outside the University and members of the community who are especially vulnerable to adverse health conditions to inform the Center's scientific agenda; Aim #2: foster investigations that consider health disparities from multiple levels of analysis via shared conceptual frameworks that integrate discipline-specific theories and methods; Aim #3: increase interest in health disparities among scientist and students from various disciplines and from community members; Aim #4: develop measures and methods that are appropriate for use with vulnerable populations and that allow factors at various levels (social/environmental, behavioral/psychological, and biological/genetic) to be analyzed together; Aim #5: increase existing knowledge on the social, behavioral, and biological factors that influence health disparities and the nature of their interactions; and, Aim #6: disseminate findings through channels established through the Center to as wide an audience as possible, including members of vulnerable populations, community-based organizations and agencies, and scientific investigators inside and outside the University. In its first five years, the Center will focus on group differences in breast cancer, notably why Black women in the US and West Africa experience breast cancers that occur at a younger age and are more aggressive and lethal than those of White women.
Development and Influence of Mentor-Child Relationships
Keller, Thomas E.
Children who demonstrate healthy social and emotional adjustment despite facing environmental risk and adversity are commonly distinguished by reliable support from a caring and competent adult. Non-parental adults who establish enduring, emotionally close relationships with children may play a role in preventing mental health problems and promoting positive development. Several preventive interventions emphasize the development and maintenance of supportive intergenerational relationships. This prospective study will focus on relationships created in a Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring program to investigate basic interpersonal processes in the development and influence of children's relationships with non-parental adults. Insights into the interpersonal processes involved in the formation and function of children's relationships with significant non-parental adults should translate into more effective preventive interventions.
BankOne Program for Leadership in Community Schools
BankOne
Lawlor, Edward F.
The University has received a $1 million donation from Bank One to prepare future social workers for leadership roles in community schools. The grant, made to the School of Social Service Administration, will fund the creation of the Bank One Program for Leadership in Community Schools, which will provide fellowships, field education and career services to prepare students to lead community schools. The program will begin this fall and is expected to benefit community schools across the country.
The Chicago Post-Secondary Transition Project
Carnegie Foundation
Roderick, Melissa
(Abstract not available.)
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