College Rewards Enterprising Faculty

Funded projects promise innovation, collaboration and new research resources

The College deans have named 16 diverse projects to be funded in the inaugural round of programs targeting improvements in research infrastructure and expansion of interdisciplinary work. The competition was launched last fall and the awards were announced in February.

The projects fit strategic goals set out by the College and the Office of the Provost, and the list provides a glimpse into future research and academic advancements at the College. Those selected represent the broad range of academic innovation pursued by College faculty.

For the Research Infrastructure Initiative, the faculty was asked to submit proposals that would facilitate the provost’s initiatives in the arts and humanities, biomedical imaging, biomedical nanoscience, China studies, future fuels and energy, and immigration and integration.

For the Interdisciplinary Projects, Programs and Centers Initiative, the faculty offered proposals that would create or expand collaborative projects, research programs and interdisciplinary centers. The 16 selected are:

Will Berelson, associate professor of earth sciences, will develop a new research program that merges microfluidics and geobiology. The program targets the creation of partnerships among USC geobiologists, engineers and others to seed research in the field and build prototype equipment.

John Bowlt, director of the Institute for Modern Russian Culture and professor of Slavic languages and literatures, will use the award to preserve and provide access to the newly donated Ferris Collection of Stalinist and Perestroika Culture. The collection of more than 10,000 items includes a broad range of written material and art from the Stalin and Perestroika eras.

Lynne Casper, professor of sociology, is creating the Southern California Population Research Center. It will be a multidisciplinary research laboratory devoted to the demographic study of the causes and consequences of population distribution and change.

Lin Chen, associate professor of biological sciences, is creating an interdisciplinary program among structural biologists and neurobiologists focusing on structure and function studies of neural receptors, transporters and ion channels. The grant will enable the purchase of high-end equipment that can be used to understand and analyze neural signaling at the molecular level.

Xiaojiang Chen, professor of biological sciences, received funding to help equip the NanoBiophysics Core Facility, which will provide USC researchers with instrument services and create a place to exchange ideas.

Michael Dear, professor of geography, received funding to create a multimedia archive of socio-economic, demographic and land-use changes along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from 1848 to the present. This project will support both the College’s Latin America Initiative and the provost’s Immigration and Integration Initiative.

For the Interdisciplinary Program for the Study of Faith in High Definition, Jane Iwamura, assistant professor of religion and of American studies and ethnicity, is forming a multidisciplinary team to explore how religion and ethics are embodied in television programs. The project will address religious beliefs and cultural values in television genres ranging from dramas to reality shows to news programs.

As director of the newly created Canadian Studies Program, Patrick James, professor of international relations, will fund a variety of programs and classes focused on generating awareness of Canada. There will be a particular focus on Canadian culture, values and that nation’s relationships with California and the United States.

Marcus Levitt, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures, will establish a Slavic Digital Research Center. It will help solve special problems scholars encounter when working with Slavic texts. Common areas of interest include the development of software that can handle the Cyrillic alphabet, and creating standards for archiving and web publishing.

Daniel Lidar, associate professor of chemistry and electrical engineering, will establish the USC Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology, which will advance research in the emerging field, from theoretical implementation of simple atomic, photonic and solid-state hardware to the development of quantum computing structures and algorithms.

Nancy Lutkehaus, director of the gender studies program and associate professor of anthropology and gender studies, will create the Southern California Women Artists Archive. The archive will utilize teams of undergraduates to collect digital interviews and other archival material from women artists in the region.

Gayla Margolin, professor of psychology, is forming the USC Center for the Study of Urban Youth. The center will seek solutions to complex problems affecting children and families in the Los Angeles area. The center will focus on research and practical applications concerning at-risk youth and preserving family well-being in urban communities.

As director of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC), Donald Miller, the Leonard K. Firestone Professor of Religion, has traveled to Rwanda, Tanzania, India, Brazil and Armenia, where he has seen the need to document how religious people attempt to create the sacred in the midst of the profane. The funding will allow the CRCC to purchase portable video production equipment that can be used in field research.
 
Anne Porter, assistant professor of art history, religion and classics, will form an Interdisciplinary Center for Commemorative Studies (ICCS) to promote innovative research on how humans document and celebrate key events, such as the creation of the World Trade Center memorial to commemorate September 11. To examine these issues, ICCS will create a collaborative community of architects, artists, designers, art historians, archaeologists, political scientists, historians and anthropologists, as well as students of religion and literature. 

For his research in paleoclimatology, Lowell Stott, professor of earth sciences, will purchase equipment that can be used to investigate how climate systems behaved on a monthly-to-seasonal basis in the past. This is an important goal of the United States’ strategic climate change research initiative.

Alan Watts, director of the Neuroscience Research Institute and professor of biological sciences, will create a Center for the Study of Neuro-Metabolic Interactions (CSNMI) to study how the brain and nervous system control metabolism. Diabetes and obesity, for instance, involve complex neural-metabolic interactions that will be investigated to better understand the disease process.