This award will contribute towards the completion of my monograph “Inscribing the pyramid of king Qakare Ibi: knowledge transfer and scribal practice in late Old Kingdom Egypt (2350–2100 BCE.)” This monument is pivotal to our understanding of the Egyptian Pyramid Texts—a 200-year-long tradition of inscribing hundreds of ritual texts on the walls in the pyramids’ subterranean chambers. Since the discovery of the latest pyramid, that of Ibi, and its publication in 1935, no further work has been undertaken on its texts, which represent the epigraphic tradition at a crucial point, between major political and religious shifts commonly associated with the collapse of the Old Kingdom. Incorporating the find of hundreds of new fragments in my archaeological fieldwork at the site of Ibi’s pyramid at Saqqara since 2015 (Mission archéologique franco-suisse de Saqqâra), and using a powerful Data Visualization platform (Zegami) to analyze the epigraphic data of the texts and their archaeological metadata, this monograph will offer a complete reassessment of this monument and its inscriptions. In this first holistic approach to these texts, I aim to emphasize their materiality and their diachronic and synchronic development, while challenging linear narratives of textual transfer and providing a more nuanced approach to understanding the interplay between text, history, and society in the late third millennium BCE.

Abdelkader was recognized as one of ‘the foremost of the few great men’ of the 19th century by the New York Times. His legacy has since then been marginalized if not almost forgotten, especially in the Anglophone world. Known as the Sufi leader of the resistance to the French military invasion of Algeria from 1832 to 1847. My project attempts to study his life and his philosophy for a chapter of my new book project, The Sacrifice of Heaven. Abdelkader deployed a metaphysics that he embodied through his political ethics in a situation of exile, at the heart of a century of industrialization. Understanding his work requires a detailed historical analysis of the inter-imperial landscape of his life combined with a philosophical understanding of his concepts. This project brings a new light to central discussions in my fields of expertise: in Islamic and Middle East studies, in French and Francophone studies as well as in the Anthropology of Islam and the Philosophy of Religions. Comparing Abdelkader both with Western philosophers such as Hegel and more famous reformists such as 'Abduh or Al Afghani will contribute to our knowledge of Europe and Muslim worlds since the nineteenth century. The result will be innovative in an Academic context where the Maghreb is particularly marginalized. I thus hope to participate in building a Non-Western Philosophical Canon at Brown.

In response to the surge in cross-border migration resulting from globalization, climate change, and inter/intra-state conflict, governments around the world have instituted a variety of policies to restrict immigration over time. However, the consequences of these restrictions on intergroup relations between majority populations and immigrant minorities are not well understood. Do restrictive immigration policies affect the social and political inclusion and integration of immigrant communities? How do they shape the majority's attitudes and behavior toward immigrant minorities? In this project, we study these questions through a multi-method historical approach in the United States, focusing on the case of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882---an unprecedented move by the US federal government to effectively prohibit the entry of immigrants originating from China for more than half a century. To do so, we draw on multiple sources of data, including historical censuses, existing and newly implemented surveys of Asian Americans, geocoded data on hate crimes targeting minorities, as well as in-person interviews and oral histories. The project will aim to provide rigorous evidence to document the short and long-term legacies of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the integration efforts of the immigrant communities affected, their socioeconomic well-being and standing, as well as the majority's attitudes and behaviors towards the communities targeted. Findings from this study have important implications for our understanding of the societal impact of immigration policies as well as their design and implementation.

My book manuscript in progress, “Decolonizing Museums in Oceania,” examines: (1) the multiple approaches that contemporary Pasifika communities are employing to reclaim and Indigenize museum spaces across Oceania and (2) how regional museums are utilizing their community location and emphasis on Pasifika arts and cultural preservation to be in alignment with ongoing movements for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. To do so, I will conduct site visits in Guåhan (Guam), Hawai‘i, Fiji, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Kanaky (New Caledonia). During these trips, I will visit the permanent and temporary exhibitions at selected national and community museums to compare how their exhibitions present and engage Pasifika histories. I will also conduct interviews with museum directors, curators, and affiliated museum professionals to learn about their work transforming their institutions into publicly engaged educational spaces. Though these institutions vary in terms of their histories, scale, public/private status, and the size and composition of their staff, they represent the broad range of museums in Oceania today. Moreover, this work is motivated by my own positionality as the son of a Vietnamese/Cambodian mother and Bolivian father and my mother and her family’s experiences as refugees who were resettled in the United States vis-à-vis circuits of U.S. empire: the Philippines, Guåhan, and Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Relatedly, from 2020-2021, I served as the Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow at the Guam Museum where I was fortunate to be invited to collaborate with Guampedia and the Guam Commission on Decolonization in developing an exhibition on the island’s decolonization movement.

In sharp contrast with an otherwise widespread and pervasive political passivity, the Putin era in Russia has witnessed a fundamental “politicization of literature.” Radical ideologies, both left- and right-wing, have become the subject matter of novels, poems, and literary debates. Reactionary phantasmagorias have been celebrated as “contemporary art,” and major highbrow publishers have come out with entire series about theories and practices of anarchism, terrorism, and revolution. Critics have debated political correctness and called each other fascists. Most recently, the invasion of Ukraine has produced a renewed state of emergency, in which writers and public intellectuals are persecuted and declared foreign agents not just for expressing themselves against the war, but for not expressing their support for it. And questions are raised, both in Russia and globally, on whether more or less canonical authors may be instrumental to Russian imperialism. Drawing on textual analysis and ethnographic research to be conducted in Germany, Latvia, and Georgia, my project investigates the meanings of this radicalization of the cultural field—which, I tentatively argue, reflects a more or less conscious desire to reevaluate ideology and cling on the possibility of political imagination in the aftermath of the neoliberal disaster of the 1990s. At the same time, this research—and the book resulting from it—will explain how politicized fiction and literary debates have served as laboratories for political narratives and have reflected, and in many ways preannounced, larger political processes in Russia and beyond. 

In February 2016, controversial rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) released The Life of Pablo with an album rollout that the press largely characterized as a disaster owing to his real-time revisions of everything from the lyrics to the final tracklist in the days following the release. Ye’s unsettling recent antics notwithstanding, I argue that his rollout offers an important glimpse into how messiness can serve as a strategy for engaging audiences directly in the dynamism of the creative process. Emerging from this line of inquiry, I am now doing preliminary research toward the development of VERSION-CONTROLLER, a public-facing “version control” prototype that allows musicians to share work in a more processual manner than is prioritized on traditional albums and streaming platforms. In software development, “version control” typically refers to a system for tracking changes to a program’s code; in the VERSION-CONTROLLER prototype users experience the life of each song as a journey along a series of pathways from the song's earliest fragments to its current form. Using funds from the Salomon Faculty Grant, I plan to hire a small research team to help develop the proof of concept through spring 2025, with the goal of launching the platform for other artists to use the following year. By making the creative process inseparable from one’s enjoyment of the art, VERSION-CONTROLLER ultimately asks us to consider how we might structure our society differently if we prioritized the ephemeral, the rhizomatic, and the messy in the tools we use to engage the art(ists) we love.

How was modernization represented by its outcasts, those banished from cities and confined into medical colonies due to fear of contagion? My project answers this question by focusing on the ways in which the voice was represented, technically reproduced and disseminated through the writings and recordings of musicians and poets confined in the Leprosarium of Agua de Dios (Colombia). Founded in 1870 to house people with Hansen’s Disease, Agua de Dios was a town synonymous with isolation while also being one of the first to have connective infrastructure like running water and a movie theatre. A town surrounded by barbed wire, where medical tests were carried out on patients, and families separated to avoid contagion, it was populated by a cosmopolitan array of banished citizens, and by artists who used the latest technologies to disseminate their work and voice their complaints. Focusing on the contact between sound reproduction and poetry will allow me to tell a different story of modernization, one that does not focus on bodily speed (transportation) or corporeal control (hygiene) as ways to render the body unnoticed. Rather, technologies enabling the voice to travel––such as the printing press, the phonograph or the radio–– allowed the creativity bred in isolation to overcome the context in which it was produced, generating unprecedented contact between outcasts, the national urban audiences and a listening public. The project explores how (un)pleasurable sounds traveled beyond the boundaries of Agua de Dios, producing a more nuanced cultural history of modernization in Colombia.

In 2016 the digitizing team at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City found an amazing object: a hummingbird wrapped in cloth attached to a 1715 Inquisitorial case. This is one of over two dozen cases against women accused of carrying hummingbirds on their person for luck in travel or love between 1650 and 1816. Because of the material significance of the hummingbird bundle attached as evidence to the 1715 file, the AGN included it in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. This gesture recognizes the exceptional value of the object as a token of Indigenous knowledge in colonial Mexico, and represents a commitment to preserving and learning from it. But the language used within these Inquisitorial cases to describe Indigenous women and their knowledge – calling them “witches” and “sorcerers,” and referring to their bundle-making practices as “superstition” or “trickery” – betrays the inherent bias of the archive against racialized historical actors. Fulfilling UNESCO’s call, then, requires looking at the Indigenous Mexican annals and painted histories that portray hummingbird bundles on their own terms: as guides for migrants. Within this corpus, a female figure in the Codex Azcatitlan (Ms. Mexicain 59-64, Bibliothèque nationale de France) is particularly revealing: she is a migrant mother who, having just crossed a river, now faces the open bundle of Huitzilopochtli, the tutelary hummingbird god of the Mexica, as if asking “where to now?” This project tells the story of this Guardian of the Sacred Bundle and other migrant women in the Indigenous Mexican archive as they are about to transform from wise women to “tricksters.”

This project documents Native Alaskan archaeology and history through recorded interviews with Douglas Anderson, Director Emeritus of the Laboratory of Circumpolar Studies (LCS) and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. The interviews will create a research resource documenting Brown University's role in the growth and development of Alaskan archaeology and its relationships with Native Alaskan people. Two Brown professors, James Louis Giddings and Douglas Anderson, played a major role in training scholars in Arctic archaeology. The collections of the LCS are a unique resource for understanding the history of Arctic cultures and environments, as well as how human/environment interactions change through time. Methodologies include question-based interviews, unstructured in-depth interviews, and elicitation thorough examination of artifacts and related archival records. Interviews will be transcribed and transformed into a dynamic research resource through text markup of key words such as names, places, and dates. This project enhances an existing collaborative research project with the National Park Service on the content and history of these collections and their significance to Native Alaskan communities.

Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award will be used to support the research and development of a work of auto-fiction tentatively titled These Andes about bi-cultural family-making in an environmentally damaged world. During my research year, I plan to gather documentary materials from two particular locations and sources: inside of our family home in Bogotá, Colombia and from the adjacent paramo, a high alpine ecosystem endemic to the Andes that acts as the country’s aquifer. As with my previous work, I plan to document (vis a vis an iterative interview practice) the lives of those people whose labor often goes unaccounted for in our official records. In this case, the women who maintain the homes of white-collar Colombians (my family included) and those who act as caretakers to the paramos (in particular the ex-guerilla combatants who have become rangers in the country's growing national park system). I am interested in the ways in which this labor makes the economic maintenance of the workers’ home-places possible while also causing a physical, emotional and environmental remove from that same space. I plan to have these interviews professionally transcribed, generating the original archive that will form the backbone of These Andes.

Humans have been listening to the animal sounds around them since the beginning of human time, to know when to hunt and when to hide, and human language arose out of this listening. The earth’s co-created acoustic blanket, made by the sounds of living creatures and geological elements, is at risk. Bioacousticians who have been paying close attention warn us that we have lost 70% of life sounds in some areas in this biophony. What can art make of this deafening silencing? How can poetry, an ancient art form that itself rose up out of attention to rhythm and sound, whose frequent goal is to make new meanings from linguistic soundings, attend to our biophony? This project will draw inspiration from several specific animals, domesticated and wild, and use professional bioacoustician as well as citizen-scientist generated field recordings from different environments and regions to create a poem cycle, which will in turn be the basis for collaboration with musicians and theater arts practitioners for an interdisciplinary Ecopoetics piece, incorporating text, sound/music, movement and design, bringing attention to this emergent area of environmental study.

(Machine) Learning to Be is a participatory, devised, hybrid multimedia performance that interweaves AI systems with theatrical conventions, choreographed movement, and experimental exploration of machine learning. Rooted in visions of decolonial AI, the performance aims to challenge existing structures of control and envision more equitable futures alongside AI technology. Part of the Data Fluencies Theatre Project, this interdisciplinary initiative involves artists, researchers, and creative technologists from diverse backgrounds, including two Brown faculty members. The project’s hybrid format, combining in-person and online elements, not only expands accessibility but also transforms the internet into a platform for both performance and critical investigation. Alongside a custom-based online venue, the performance features an interactive choreographic interface that aims to engage AI as embodiment technologies and an AI character that aims to convey the multifaceted nature of AI, its dangers and possibilities. Additionally, the project seeks to engage students through data fluencies play workshops, thereby fostering an inclusive environment that encourages critical reflection on the implications of technological advancement. The funding from the Salomon Faculty Research Award will support a residency for (Machine) Learning to Be that will culminate in two campus performances and one data fluencies play workshop.

Ecocritical studies centering on music and sound have burgeoned since the millennium, but only a few accounts touch upon the marine environment – a gap that is disproportionate both to the wealth of sea-centered music that people create, and to the severity of our marine climate emergency. Following colleagues in the “blue humanities” this project elucidates music’s role in cultivating marine affinities, by centering on sound and society in Atlantic Canada – a region with a deep but troubled maritime heritage, where debates about resource management, cultural survival, and the natural world have intertwined for centuries. Focusing particularly on Nova Scotia, I explore four key moments where music has inflected popular notions about our relationship with the sea, ranging from 1930s-era folkloric romanticism to more recent efforts where musicians have engaged community decline, industrial fishing, environmental racism, and conflicts pitting fishers against environmentalists and ecotourism operators. I draw on archival resources, interviews, and textual analysis, following public discourse and community in each of these moments to show how nautical affinities have evolved at the intersection of folklore scholarship, labor expertise, everyday conversation, media reportage, scientific research, and traditional song. Ultimately, the resulting book project will make a significant contribution by outlining a “vernacular sea” that blends experiential wisdom with scientists’ data, and oral history with invented traditions.

Neuroinflammation precipitates cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. This proposed research focuses on CHI3L1, a prominent AD biomarker and inflammatory molecule, which we've recently found hinders neurogenesis and cognitive function. Our latest published studies highlight strong therapeutic potential and  form the foundation of this described endeavor. Importantly, this project is a result of a unique collaboration that interfaces two of Brown's forte areas: CHI3L1 biology and AD research. Brown stands as a national leader in CHI3L1 studies, supported by several active faculty members. Moreover, this initiative amplifies Brown's commitment to Alzheimer's research, elevating the stature of the newly formed Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research. Finally, the project's lead, a junior faculty in the process of building his research portfolio, has been instrumental in shaping this innovative research direction, aiming to elevate Brown's reputation in the domain.

The problem of fine-tuning AI models to personalize them to match the specific (e.g., entertainment) preferences of an individual or population is sometimes called the alignment problem.  Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which solicits human judgments of an AI's behavior is a promising alignment strategy.  Indeed, it has been a key ingredient in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly for commercial applications. Intuitively, iterated RLHF, a dynamic process in which soliciting human feedback and retraining based on this feedback is repeated multiple times, is an even more promising alignment strategy. Our goal in this proposal is to build on the early successes of RLHF by undertaking a more rigorous mathematical analysis of the alignment problem. More specifically, we propose to develop several game-theoretic models of alignment, and to analyze and experiment with the dynamics of iterated RLHF in these games.

The proposed project will seed a regional paleoclimate study and facilitate student research, curriculum development, scientific collaboration, and community outreach. Total ice volume and global mean sea-level changes during the Pleistocene rely on oxygen isotope records from ocean sediment and ice cores. However, such records have limitations that result in widely varying ice volume and sea-level reconstructions. Terrestrial records can therefore fill an important gap in reconstructing past ice sheet extent and sea-level history. One region of North America that contributes significant uncertainty in reconstructions of past ice sheet extent is New England. Since glacial advances tend to erase evidence of previous glaciations, the terrestrial record of ice sheet extent can be sparse. In New England, the southernmost terminal moraine deposits that stretch from Long Island to Cape Cod consist of glacio-tectonically deformed glacial sediments of unknown age. This proposal requests seed-funding to carry out optically stimulated luminescence dating of these inorganic deposits for which radiocarbon dating is infeasible. Additionally, bulk chemistry and isotopic analyses of stratified iron oxide layers within the glacial deposits will be carried out to fingerprint past sea-level changes associated with glaciation. The research activities will support ongoing curriculum development in DEEPS, undergraduate research projects, collaboration with RISD’s Nature Lab, and the Nature Conservancy on Block Island. Seed funding will help to establish a field-based and community-orientated project that is of interest to the broader scientific community and can lead to future funding opportunities.

Infectious disease is a leading cause of global morbidity and mortality. Transmission dynamic models often help guide public health response to infectious disease, projecting how potential interventions (e.g., therapeutics, vaccines) can help curtail its spread. However, they typically scale effects from small studies and may produce overly optimistic estimates of population-level intervention effectiveness. Post hoc observational studies could help address this by measuring intervention effectiveness in real-world settings. Observational causal inference approaches, including difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods, estimate the impact of an intervention based on empirical counterfactuals: comparing outcomes of interest between treated units with those of similar untreated units.  However, applying these to infectious disease is not straightforward, as they can produce misleading estimates with nonlinear outcomes.  Even where observational methods perform well, it remains challenging to transport estimates to new settings to predict the impact of future interventions. To address these issues, this project will develop architecture to synthesize transmission dynamic models with observational causal inference – employing empirical counterfactuals while accounting for complex population dynamics. We will illustrate our methods re-analyzing prior studies as well as applying them to new questions about respiratory illness control, in collaboration with partners in state and local public health institutions.

Private equity investments in US health care have grown over 20-fold from $5 billion in 2000 to over $100 billion in 2018. In general, PE firms acquire a company to enhance its value and resell (exit) it within 3 to 7 years, often at a considerable profit. While prior research has shown PE acquisitions increase health care spending and change service line provision based on profitability, less is known about spillover effects of PE on health care providers that are not acquired but compete in the same geographic market. This project combines novel data on PE ownership of physician practices with longitudinal medical claims data to provide policy-relevant evidence on the spillover effects of PE with an emphasis on potential unintended effects on access to timely care. Findings will contribute policy-relevant evidence to the growing body of research on the effects of corporate consolidation in health care. In addition to peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations, we will develop a coordinated dissemination strategy to communicate findings to policymakers, advancing the research and policy priorities of the Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research at Brown University.

In spring 2017, five days after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, I began teaching a university course titled “Recent Experiments in American Fiction.” The literary works on the reading list were chosen with a rationale that was spelled out in the syllabus description: twenty-first-century American literature, I had written, was “undergoing a renaissance, the defining quality of which is its exploration of a conceptual space located ‘on the very edge of fiction.’” The quotation was by one of the writers I would assign, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner. This book project uses the pedagogical experience of that course as a critical entry point to the autobiographical turn in the work of contemporary fiction writers in the United States. Whereas in the past such practices could be marginalized as exceptional or experimental, consigned to the work of specific writers or boutique literary movements, their recent prevalence across a range of disciplines and fields requires that we think this development as historical, rather than as ephemeral or subjective. Artists, filmmakers, philosophers, and literary critics now skirt the conceptual divide between fiction and nonfiction so routinely that the unsettled nature of the boundary seems to be a condition of enunciation. In order to grasp this development more completely and more directly than has been done in literary criticism to date, my project adopts an experimental register, treading a delicate line between scholarly and fictional discourses as a way to establish a relation of maximal closeness with its object.

Giamaica is a book-length poem about the complex relations between Jamaican popular culture and Italian cinema. The project’s symbolic figure is Perry Henzell, a Jamaican filmmaker who suffered mental and financial breakdown after co-writing and directing a landmark of world cinema and the island’s first feature, 1972’s The Harder They Come. It is fairly well known that THTC was a major vehicle for reggae’s global spread, due to its soundtrack, its setting in the world of Jamaican music, and its star: singer/songwriter Jimmy Cliff. Less well known is the toll the film’s production took on its director and the ontological relationships between THTC and distinct strands of Italian cinema—neorealist dramas and so-called spaghetti westerns. Henzell, who was white, was highly complex—an atheist who believed in Rastafari; a communist who came out of bankruptcy as owner of a small hotel; and a promoter of black separatists. I knew Henzell very well. Giamaica crossexamines my memory of him, his movie, works based on it, including a novel and two musicals. There is a clear trajectory between this project and my forthcoming collection Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which was completed with the support of a 2019 Salomon. In both works the interdisciplinary and experimental are subsumed into the intellect of sound. As a newly promoted associate professor in a department with a history of close engagement with diverse artistic practices and legacies of Europe, I stand to complicate, expand and reshape a tradition with this work.

This proposal seeks funding from the Salomon Faculty Research Award to support a new play development residency that will conclude with a public performance presentation on campus. How We Go Missing, is a new play by Indigenous playwrights Tomantha Sylvester, of the Anishinaabe Theatre Exchange and Dr. Carolyn Dunn, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Cal State LA. The proposed week-long residency and performance presentation will bring together four artist collaborators from the Anishinaabe Theatre Exchange and the playwrights. How We Go Missing orients Theatrical Performance as Intervention. Pressing socio-political concerns impacting contemporary Indigenous women and communities remain largely invisible in mainstream narratives. How We Go Missing unearths potent concerns and polyvocal truths. The storytelling gives rise to humanistic inquiry, and ultimately invites healing through the tradition of oral storytelling.Support from the Solomon Faculty Research Award will increase the canon of new Indigenous works and advance greater visibility of Indigenous Theatre Performance. New Indigenous play development and a public presentation on campus can situate Brown as a significant site of Indigenous Theatremaking and amplify commitments to collaborative public humanities other commitments to campus initiatives.

Air pollution from crop residue burning is a leading cause of respiratory diseases and mortality in developing countries. Notwithstanding legislation preventing it, this practice remains widespread in South Asia, where affected areas have levels of airborne particulate 20 times higher than the safety threshold established by the WHO. We study the political causes of environmental laws enforcement by focusing on polluting behavior at one of the most conflictual borders, that separating India and Pakistan. First, we develop a strategy to identify the contribution of each country to air pollution using detailed spatial data on fires occurrence and a meteorological model predicting the spread of PM particles in the air. Second, we study the political incentives to stop or allow polluting behavior by leveraging shifts in wind direction causing a fire in the same location to generate pollution externalities for its country or for the neighboring country. Finally, we explore variation in political incentives to curb polluting behavior in areas with a history of violent territorial disputes, and where religious sites of the other confession might induce moderating behavior. Our study highlights the environment as a fundamental dimension of border disputes in international relations. Findings from this study have important implications for the reduction of environmental degradation and of the additional health costs paid by individuals living in conflictual areas due to pollution wars.

The Salomon Award  would support the creation of Ghost Room, an installation of fifteen 30 x 40 lenticular prints. Ghost Room builds on the ideas and methods of Paper Empires, a series of large collages based on photographs of trompe l'oeil fantasies from Pompeii. The images for the lenticulars will be based on videos of Vesuvius' crater, intermixed with architectural details from Pompeii. Throughout the history of European art and architecture, Greco Roman decorative details have been deployed to invoke myths of the stability of “Western Civilization”. In contrast, this piece is a meditation on the impermanence of architecture, the self, and institutions. My intention is to use Pompeii as a foil to consider other worlds that have disappeared. The ghostly presentation of architectural forms that appear and disappear on rock faces suggests enough about ruins, loss, and impermanence without requiring a specific affinity for or interest in Roman architecture. As one moves through the room, panels will flicker between images of rock faces and trompe l’oeil architectural forms. I have worked in both video and still images. Lenticulars (interlaced still photographic images overlaid with linear lensing material to create the illusion of movement) hover between these media, suggesting the 4th dimension. The installation will be open to the public. Audiences will include the Providence art community, people interested in decorative arts, architecture and spatial politics.

This project supports and supplements the born-digital monograph Border Assemblages: Recollecting Moria, part of the University’s Digital Monographs Initiative. The monograph is an archaeological ethnography of the largest refugee camp of Europe, the camp of Moria on the island of Lesvos (Greece), which was destroyed by fire in 2020. Based on fieldwork between 2016 and 2022, the monograph explores how materiality and temporality (and the interplay between the two) shaped life and experience in the camp for the hundreds of thousands of people-on-the-move who passed through it. It also narrates how, through various material interventions, the camp inhabitants engaged in their own practices of resistance and reshaped life in the camp, especially when top-down policies and practices were failing. This materially grounded history can inform global discussions on bordering practices and on the new kinds of border infrastructure currently in operation around the world. It can also constitute an important theoretical contribution on transient materiality, and on difficult or “dark” material heritage. As part of this grant, collected objects will be curated, a database will be created, and a public website/photographic diary will be designed, telling the visual story of this camp, a resource of important archival value which will also enhance the digital monograph. This project will support a flagship Brown University initiative on digital publishing, it will strengthen further migration studies at Brown, and will contribute to the rescuing of the material memory of the mass journey from the Global South to the Global North.

As global media networks promise boundless access, we are facing increasing layers of walls: the computer firewalls, the Facebook Wall, China’s Great Firewall, and the virtual walls in the virtual reality (VR) technologies…. The existence of these walls shatters the myth of an open space of flow and highlights the significant function of the walled enclosure as a prevalent media apparatus in managing, structuring, and framing information, knowledge, and experience. This project studies the technological and socio-cultural history of walls in digital media by examining the formation of the “wall” as simultaneously a material object and a structural metaphor. Combining media studies, architecture studies, and history of science and technology, the book analyzes the mediating function and controlling mechanism of the above-mentioned four types of digital walls, presenting both an archeology of the wall as a technological artifact and a genealogy of the wall as a discursive formation. The project asks: Where do these walls come from for what purposes? How are they designed and operated? It analyzes the wall as an asymmetrical and contradictory structure that is both a blocking barrier and a displaying surface. Shifting from the metaphor of “window” to that of “wall,” the book calls for a theoretical reconsideration of modern media, changing the focus from visual representation to environmental management that is marked by distinction, demarcation and discrimination. The project contributes to Brown’s prominent scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields of digital and environmental media studies as well as the critical studies of science and technology.

Compiled by the virtuosic Fujiwara no Kintō in the early eleventh century, The Collection of Japanese-Chinese Resonant Verse (Wakan rōeishū, 1010s) is an understudied monument of classical Japanese literature. It is also a site from which to survey the vantages and grounds of literary comparison in our latter day. Hewing to a quirky encyclopedic order, the bilingual anthology juxtaposes fragments of poetry and prose written in Chinese (kanshibun)—the scripta franca of prenational East Asia—with local “songs” (uta) of thirty-one syllables in the local Japanese vernacular. Vividly recognizable as a kind comparative literature avant la lettre, the recombinatory collection throws radically different poetries into a relation of mutual estrangement and resonance. Meanwhile, it discloses a “geopoetic” imagination of the wider world with its manifold locales: Japan and China, yes, but also westerly Persia, mythical Penglai, bygone Parhae, and elsewhere. Poetics of Elsewhere explores itineraries departing from The Collection of Resonant Verse and moving through unattended terrains of its millennium-long afterlife. In so doing, the project considers how a premodern, nonwestern text might equip us with approaches to the study of remote times and cultures today. Already in progress, Poetics of Elsewhere will result in a new critical translation of the anthology and a scholarly monograph assessing the work outside constrictive binaries (Japan/China, premodern/modern, East/West, etc.) and spatialities (the “area” of area studies, the “nation” of national philology, etc.). The grant will facilitate long-delayed visits to archives and libraries and collaboration with researchers in Japan, where borders have recently reopened.

Five decades of school finance reforms have increased equality of state funding, providing more money for low-income districts. Yet the achievement gap between high- and low-income students grew by 40% since 1970, driven by faster growth in high-income areas. One explanation for growing inequality despite more equal funding could be hidden money from school-supporting non-profits, including parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and booster clubs. Non-profit funds are a hidden source of inequality because they do not appear in district budgets, but can cover expenses that free district funds for instructional spending. This project creates the National Longitudinal Database of School-Supporting Non-Profits 1995-2020 based on millions of non-profit tax return records from the Internal Revenue Service. Non-profits are geocoded and linked to district-level data on finances, student composition, and performance to examine how much non-profit funds differ by student income and race and how they relate to student outcomes. Preliminary analyses indicate highly unequal non-profit funds. Seed funds would allow testing and adjustment of the non-profit coding process to provide proof of concept for future grant proposals.

This project will explore links between state policy and dementia, a devastating neurodegenerative syndrome that is among the most pressing population health issues of the century. While dementia prevalence is known to vary geographically in the U.S., the contextual factors underlying these patterns are poorly understood. This project focuses on state policy as a potential contextual correlate of dementia, one that may contribute to observed geographic variation. Prior research shows that places with more liberal policies or policy orientations—more generous income supports and social services, stronger protections for marginalized groups, and stricter economic and public health regulations—evince longer life expectancies and lower disability than more conservative contexts. The proposed research will therefore study the relationship between state policy orientation and dementia. Funds will enable the assembly of longitudinal state policy data spanning several decades, and linkage with individual-level data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative panel survey of older U.S. adults. This project will contribute to an emerging body of literature on the macrosocial and multilevel factors driving large and growing geographic disparities in health. It will also provide preliminary evidence to be used in the development of a proposal for external funding. It will advance Brown University’s position by facilitating the development of new expertise in gerontology—a field for which Brown is already internationally recognized—from a social scientific perspective and with an emphasis on social determinants of health, life course processes, and health disparities. 

Anthropogenic disturbances pose a serious threat to animals and their ecosystems. Aquatic ecosystems have been identified as particularly vulnerable to the impacts of human activity due to their isolation and fragmentation; biodiversity is also at risk because endemic aquatic species cannot relocate or adapt fast enough to rapidly evolving new conditions. In this collaborative student-centered research project, we will assess the combined effects of climate change and chemical pollution on behavioral, neurodevelopmental, and genetic endpoints using a zebrafish model system. Specifically, studies will focus on the interaction of heat waves and exposure to forever chemicals including PCBs, PFAS and microplastics and to common agricultural pesticides including chlorpyrifos, paraquat and ziram. The significance of increasing temperature on freshwater biota has long been recognized but there is relatively sparse information about the effects of exposure to more extreme weather events such as heat waves in combination with chemical pollutants on biological systems. This project addresses that knowledge gap. Our research also resonates with Brown’s strategic plan as it falls under the topic of Sustaining Life on Earth and is founded on an integrated plan of scholarship and education that partners a faculty member with undergraduate students using an evidence-based approach that promotes STEM retention and STEM diversification and allows students to flourish as independent researchers making authentic research contributions to problems with significant societal impact.

Why do we crave alcohol and not apples? We are innately wired to seek and respond to rewards, but addictive substances can overwhelm our natural reward pathways required for memory formation and impulse control. In recent years our knowledge of molecular genetics has exploded, and has influenced the field of neuroscience so much that we have an exponentially greater understanding of how our genes and molecules impact addiction. Recent scientific research from animal models suggests that drugs and alcohol can alter the way that DNA is tightly wound, the way DNA get transcribed into RNA, the way RNA gets translated into proteins and the function of these proteins. Furthermore, new research is emerging showing how we can change our own brain gene expression through lifestyle and pharmacology. However, this level of understanding has yet to reach the level of physicians, educators, government and the general public. It is essential to clearly communicate this new science, and bridge the gap between science, education and policy because it can have major impacts on treatment for alcohol and substance use disorder.

Meteorites are fragments of planetesimals left over from the earliest stages of planet formation and, therefore, investigating their chemical and isotopic compositions can provide direct insights into the nature and timescales of processes in the nascent Solar System (about 4.5 billion years ago). A uniquely powerful tool in this respect are nucleosynthetic isotope anomalies, which are mass-independent isotope variations resulting from the heterogeneous distribution of presolar grains that condensed in previous stellar environments. Such analyses, for example, aid in constraining (i) the stellar environments that contributed material to the Solar System, (ii) how this material was transported and processed in its early stages, and (iii) how planetesimals accreted and eventually grew to planets. However, current cosmochemical research and progress is severely hampered by analytical issues regarding the incomplete dissolution of presolar grains during sample digestion and the inability to obtain certain types of isotope data on the very same sample material. This work aims to overcome these limitations by establishing new procedures for complete sample digestion utilizing laser-assisted melting and for combined isotope analyses of oxygen and ‘heavy’ elements. Combined, these capabilities have great potential for providing unprecedented insights into currently uninvestigated processes and powerful new means for revisiting our understanding of the early dynamical evolution of the Solar System, the genetic relationships among meteoritic and planetary materials, as well as the processes of planet formation, including the origin of Earth’s building materials and habitability.

This project will develop proof of concept data directly relevant to the long-term stability of the Antarctic ice cap. Graduate student Jared Nirenberg, working with Prof. Herbert, has discovered that a marine sediment core lying off the Antarctic coast likely contains unique clues both to the temperature of the ocean and continental climate over the period ~17-14 million years ago, the last time in earth history that the Antarctic was largely deglaciated. Ground-truthing of geochemical measurements will be essential to buttress a proposal to be submitted to the NSF Marine Geology and Geophysics program. These initial measurements will broadly capture ocean temperatures off Antarctica and also recover evidence of plant material washed or blown from the continent during the period of warmer  climate.  Given the importance of Antarctic ice volume to global sea level, successful completion of the project should result in high impact publications that would strengthen EEPS strong reputation in the study of past climates, and the research group of Prof. Herbert, which is becoming known as a leading center for the study of past warm climates. 

Structured and compositional concept learning is essential for principled generalization in Artificial Intelligence, such as deploying a robot to a novel environment. Existing approaches (e.g. neuro-symbolic learning) assume that the structured concepts are to be constructed explicitly, for example by detecting individual objects and their attributes in a scene. In this proposal, we ask the research question: can we learn implicit structured representations in a generic, multi-task, and end-to-end trained neural network? Our hope is that the implicit representation achieves similar compositional generalization behavior as the explicitly structured concepts. Solving this question would enable us to apply a flexible and unified neural network to jointly perform perception, reasoning, and planning, all of which are crucial for robotics manipulation. We hypothesize that recent advances in self-supervised and multimodal learning from visual and audio data provide promising solutions to learn the implicit structured representation, via dynamic concept binding in deep neural networks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed learning framework, we propose to collect a new multimodal video-language dataset of astronaut spacewalks in collaboration with professors working on robotics, language understanding, and computer vision in the Computer Science department.

1. Cigarette smoking is more prevalent in people with HIV (PWH), when compared with the general population, and is linked to increased morbidity and mortality. PWH who smoke have increased rates of cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, and lung cancers. While most PWH report a strong desire to quit, they are less likely to quit when compared to the general population. PWH often respond poorly to traditional smoking cessation treatments, which may be partly due to their difficulty managing anxiety and depressive symptoms. Psilocybin, a classic psychedelic, has been shown to have potential as a therapeutic treatment for psychiatric symptoms, such as anxiety and depression, and substance use disorders, including tobacco dependence. Our specific aims are to:  1) explore, using qualitative methods, perceptions of psychedelic treatment: perceived benefits and harms, barriers, preferences, and likelihood of engaging in psilocybin-based treatment for smoking cessation; and, 2) examine the acceptability of psilocybin-based treatment for smoking cessation among PWH who smoke. We will enroll 40-60 PWH who smoke cigarettes and will conduct 60-minute in-depth qualitative interviews. The results from this project will provide the foundation for an application to the National Cancer Institute to conduct a pilot randomized clinical trial. Anxiety and depression can be broad barriers to any behavior change. Administering a cutting-edge treatment, such as psilocybin, to reduce anxiety/depression may help PWH who smoke make a healthy behavior change. This study will be the first to examine the feasibility and acceptability of utilizing psilocybin to improve smoking cessation outcomes among PWH who smoke.

My proposal requests funding support to involve Brown students and recent alumni in the production of BACKLIGHT, a microbudget narrative film. Production (principal photography) will take place in Providence this summer. Brown students and alumni will fill numerous crew and cast positions, working with professionals in key creative, technical and organizational roles who will provide guidance and training, and help ensure a safe and professional working and learning environment. In my 25 years of teaching filmmaking and screenwriting, first at RISD and since 2013 at Brown, students have been substantially involved in all of my filmmaking, including three feature films and several shorts. A Salomon Research Award would enable me to formalize and support the involvement of Brown students and recent grads in this project, and help address a substantial demand for learning through hands-on production experiences. Funding would go towards production expenses and stipends, and help to make internship opportunities accessible to students with financial need. Low-budget, professional-level filmmaking, which gives young filmmakers direct on-set experiences and mentorship, has been especially hampered by the pandemic, resulting in few opportunities for this type of learning. This project will help fill this gap, bringing groups of students and professionals together for the multifaceted and intensively collaborative experience of film production.

I am proposing an expansion of my current interdisciplinary art series, “By Way of Revolution,” in preparation for several national and international exhibitions between 2022 and 2023. The project creates space for dialogue and communion among BlPOC women (cis, trans, gender non-conforming) who have historically served as overlooked yet vital assets within care politics and activist labor. The research based project combines oral, written, and embodied histories from civil rights movements of the past with images of present day activists. The work begins with gathering oral histories from present day activists and descendants of civil rights activists. I also conduct library research in liberation archives, including Black Panther newspapers and civil rights photographs. The work is further grounded through movement based research on psychosomatics and body based tools for healing and social organizing. I then work with the archival relics that activism leaves behind, turning these residues into artworks. In mixed media collages, images of historical activism are transformed into crowns of adornment on images of contemporary women. Through video, female performers activate gestures of resistance with archives projected onto their bodies. Through sculpture, crowns are made three dimensional and are worn by performers who activate space through processional style protests. I involve community at every level of this project, including in its research and production phase. Recent iterations have included Black Lives Matter chapter leaders and founders. Upcoming iterations involve Brown students, faculty and staff who identify as women of color. 

This project explores how individuals who migrated to the US as adults for life science graduate training—a population I term “knowledge migrants”— make migration and professional decisions following their training’s completion. Extant literature focuses on how knowledge migrants primarily weigh scientific aspirations and economic effects in making these choices. This approach neglects individuals’ wider experiences and desires, including their experiences of the US academy and potential conflicts between kin in the nation of origin and new ties made in the US. This project examines not only these interpersonal factors but also the political, popular, and academic discourses that knowledge migrants contend with as they decide their future—especially those that construct knowledge migrants as the most desirable kind of migrant and the university as the locus of pure knowledge. This ethnographic project provides a person-centered account of how individuals weigh self, science, and circulating social norms in making these nation- and academy-altering decisions. Funding for initial work on this project will thus benefit Brown in three ways: 1) it will greatly strengthen planned applications for external funding; 2) it will enhance the project’s potential to inform graduate education in the life sciences; 3) it will advance not only the PI’s career but also the position of the campus units with which she is affiliated (Department of Education; Population Study and Training Center; Annenberg Institute; Taubman Center; Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies).

“The Global Grey Parrot” puts a charismatic African animal (Psittacus erithacus and P. timneh) at the center of world history. Drawing on diverse sources and methods, “The Global Grey Parrot” follows these birds through centuries and around the globe. This more-than human history is not only environmental and economic; it also explores cognition and affect, revealing a fraught more-than-human politics. It also is distinguished by connecting non-human networks to human exclusions of race and class. It begins in African forests before 1500, where Greys shared knowledge and culture in flocks. Caged and exported throughout the Atlantic World, they retained their social expectations. When tamed, they do not readily submit to discipline and act out their trauma. During centuries of captivity, Greys and people developed experience of each other, but only humans transmitted knowledge to others. In isolation, Greys cannot produce culture. Now, in the Anthropocene, Greys are trafficked from their native habitat as one more commodity demanded from Africa by global markets. They are also bred in agro-industrial facilities, many produced far from their native forests in South Africa, where super-exploitative wages allow profitability. Theirs is an African condition. As wild populations decline and captive ones grow, Greys’ collective experience will be increasing confinement in human spaces. Sanctuaries and re-wilding projects offer respite from human demands. Human-parrot co-parenting of chicks may show how to create a common culture and bequeath it to offspring of both species. Recognizing parrots’ historical world-making could foster mutual world-making. The proposed fieldwork will complete the research.

The First Pandemic of Bubonic Plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis struck the Mediterranean world in 541 CE and recurred for 200 years. Our understanding of this disease has long relied solely on fragmentary written records but has recently been revolutionized by archaeogenetic research on human skeletons from Spain, France, Britain, and Germany where Y. pestis aDNA has been preserved in dozens of plague victims. Though at least 14 Plague outbreaks are known in Italy from written sources during this period, no archaeological research has yet been undertaken to identify Plague victims in excavated cemeteries. Building on our ongoing archaeological fieldwork at Vacone, Italy, where we have excavated a cemetery of the 7th century AD, we aim to establish a comparative chronological framework through which we can investigate health and disease in the hinterland of Rome. To do this, we propose here a first step of radiocarbon dating 40 skeletal samples from early medieval cemeteries in order to obtain absolute dates and refine chronologies for these burials. These dates will allow us to contextualize these burials within their historical context and ask targeted research questions such as those related to the First Pandemic. This project lays the first steps to a fuller understanding of an already turbulent period where Byzantine, Papal, and Lombard powers jostled for control, and investigates--for the first time in Italy--archaeological evidence for the role that pandemic disease played in this difficult and poorly understood period.

Children Seeking Freedom: Race, Labor, and Childhood in Cuba is the first book-length historical study that explores how children and childhood were implicated in, and central to, the transition away from enslaved labor in the Caribbean. The book examines the conditions and fates of poor children as they were subject to shifting notions of freedom and parental, adult, and state authority from the slow end of slavery in the 1880s through the consolidation of the postcolonial Cuban republic in the 1910s and 1920s. By straddling the colonial and national divide, Children Seeking Freedom traces the development of legal, social, institutional, and economic structures as they related to and affected the lives young Cubans living on the margins of society—especially orphans, incarcerated children, and poor children who had intermittent exposure to traditional public education or parental support. Rather than focusing primarily on institutional responses to and discourse about Cuban children, however, Children Seeking Freedom centers the experiences, hopes, creative choices, and struggles of young Cubans living on the margins of society. Taking inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s call “to recover the insurgent ground” and “illuminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls” in the United States, Children Seeking Freedom looks beyond the elite perspectives of social reformers, state officials, and criminal justice and reform institutions, exploring how poor boys and girls experienced the transition from colony to independence, formed community,  and developed their own moral codes and ways of being in an emerging republic characterized by deep inequality.

Over the past decades, electronic tools have expanded the opportunities for creative musical expression. Modern composers have benefited from this development, with access to ever more powerful and user-friendly technologies. And yet those technologies are not equally accessible to all. The ubiquity of graphical interfaces makes most tools for music composition useless for the visually impaired. My project seeks to address this challenge. Working closely with a talented and visually impaired graduate composer, I have seen first-hand the ineffectiveness of currently available solutions. Screen-reading software provides users with basic information, but it never allows them to tap into other sensory modalities—such as haptic and interface-coupled auditory feedback—that could tell them even more. My project proposes to flip the script in order to create a more inclusive and ultimately more creative solution. Building on my patent-awarded research, I will develop an original software/hardware system with a custom user interface that allows visually impaired composers full access to create interactive electronic music. With the help of a Salomon Faculty Research Award, I will design and build enabling technology to address the inequity of currently available tools. Ultimately, this project will: Allow visually impaired composers access to tools that sighted peers use daily; Bolster Brown’s reputation as a site of accessible human-computer interface design; Develop new technology with possible patent potential; Foster new creative work by visually impaired composers in the field of electronic music; and Provide a tool for sighted composers as well, through concepts of universal design.

The Long Walk to Freedom is a public humanities collaboration between historian Vazira Zamindar and independent graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee to create a graphic novel and animated short about a long walk that Mahatma Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan (affectionately called Frontier Gandhi) took in 1946/47 across a landscape of intense religious strife, to heal its wounds and restore faith in our capacity to live together as part of a multi-religious society again. By literally drawing from these forgotten scenes of an extraordinary friendship, this project is imagined as an intervention in 1) historiographic debates on anticolonialism and ‘freedom,’ 2) public memory where such friendships can become ‘anti-national’ heresy, and 3) ethno-religious nationalisms that target religious minorities, and continuously produce and naturalize an irreconcilably divided South Asia. While archival material for this project is drawn from my monograph The Ruin Archive, as a collaboration between a historian and an artist, we draw on our own friendship to walk with Gandhi and Khan, and in so doing we push against the historian’s craft and the artist’s, to restitute a shared inheritance beyond Hindu/Muslim, beyond nation/state. This project captures Brown's commitment to public and collaborative humanities, and we hope will speak to the historical imagination for another kind of South Asia.

A sharp and widespread increase in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) over the past three decades has seriously threatened our capability to treat bacterial infections. Of particular concern is the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively-drug resistant (XDR) strains of pathogens that resist even the last-resort drugs like carbapenems, cephalosporins, and polymyxins. WHO warns that current clinical pipelines contain an insufficient number of new compounds to mitigate this rising AMR challenge. Fortunately, the past few decades have also seen a rapid development of structural biology techniques like nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), a form of spectroscopy that can generate high-resolution atomic insights of protein structure, thereby opening new avenues for structure-based drug design. These advances have led to the development of a new discipline called Fragment-based Drug Discovery (FBDD), which is at the forefront of many pharmaceutical research programs and has proven success in antimicrobial drug development. Of note, FBDD is ideal for drug optimization and should not be confused with high-throughput screening (HTS). Given the fact that the majority of recently approved antimicrobial agents for Gram-negative pathogens are β-lactam-β-lactamase inhibitor combinations, here we propose to use the FBDD approach to design inhibitors against Ambler class A/C/D β-lactamases TEM-1, SHV-1, OXA-40, and PDC-3. Our long-term goal for this project is to develop new inhibitors based on the diazabicyclooctane scaffold found in the next-generation β-lactamase inhibitors like avibactam. This application seeks funds to purchase a commercially available fragment chemical library to establish NMR-FBDD screening platform. 

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm concerned with agents that learn to solve tasks by trial and error. While RL has advanced quickly in recent years, learning is, compared to humans, incredibly slow, requiring millions of trials to learn something that a human can learn in hundreds. One key difference is that RL is accomplished tabula rasa, whereas humans come to each new problem with a wealth of prior knowledge about the world, which dramatically accelerates learning. Matching human learning efficiency will require a means of communicating such knowledge to RL agents. We therefore propose RLang, a domain-specific programming language designed to express anything that a human may wish to tell an RL agent. RLang will serve as a direct means of giving such information to an agent, and as a target for automatically translating natural language instructions. No such language currently exists, and the opportunity to develop one and have it see wide uptake would cement Brown’s already prominent reputation in both RL and grounded natural language.  However, a prerequisite for a credible RLang grant is a substantial software-engineering effort, of the type not well suited to AI graduate students. I am therefore applying for funding to hire a Research Assistant--who has experience in software engineering, AI, and natural language--to spend six months building the software infrastructure necessary to support a research program centered on RLang.

Random polynomials occur naturally in various areas of Physics and Mathematics, such as in quantum chaotic systems and approximation theory. The study of random polynomials has a number of applications in computer science and engineering. In addition, studying roots of high-degree polynomials is an important problem in Mathematics that is useful in both pure and applied sciences. The goal of this research project is to study fundamental problems concerning the distribution of roots of random polynomials and, more generally, random functions.  More specifically, the project aims to study the variance and the Central Limit Theorem for the number of real roots of various classical models of random functions. To attack these problems, the PI will develop the local universality method and build on different tools in analysis and probability.

The need to develop and carry out organic chemical reactions under environmentally friendly conditions is a key national goal.  I propose to develop organic reactions that will be done without using organic solvents.  Preliminary results obtained during the summer 2021 suggest that it is possible to prepare new, patentable analogs of antiviral compounds to treat a variety of viral infections including new and existing COVID variants and also analogs of a potent ion channel blocker, tetrodotoxin (TTX), of current interest to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  I seek funds to develop a small-scale reactor for conducting no solvent reactions with reactive organometallic reagents to synthesize new physiologically active compounds. The most impact of this research program is environmental.  Success of this project will lead to a very significant decrease in the quantity of bulk solvents utilized to prepare, transport, store and use organic chemicals. Hence the unifying theme of this proposal is that development and control of organic reactions carried out without the use of solvents and storage/transport of chemical and pharmaceutical compounds is safer, cheaper and more efficient when the reagents are prepared and handled without utilizing toxic organic solvents such as volatile hydrocarbons, halogen containing compounds and/or ether pollutants. These solvents are utilized at the multimillion-ton scale annually. Elimination of these portend a very favorable environmental impact.  I will focus on the synthesis of analogs of antiviral and other physiologically active compounds starting from readily available, non-toxic sugars and monosaccharides to develop green chemical methodology. 

Real-world data are critical to understand drug effects in populations that are excluded in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). US Medicare claims are among the most powerful real-world data, given their large size and inclusion of older adults who are often excluded from RCTs. An important area of real-world research for older adults is health outcomes that result from transitions of care (e.g., discharge from a hospital to a post-acute care skilled nursing facility [SNF]). Medication changes during this period are particularly important to understand, as drugs are often started or stopped due to competing health demands. However, Medicare data do not capture medication use in post-acute care SNFs because of bundled payments. Thus, to date, we have been unable to examine medication use and effects in the post-acute care SNF setting. Our team has recently acquired Omnicare long-term care pharmacy data (>60% of US nursing homes) that can be linked to Medicare claims to fill this gap. We propose a pilot project to use Omnicare data in a retrospective cohort study of older adults who experience a hip fracture and are discharged to a SNF for post-acute care. First, we will examine initiation of analgesic regimens post-fracture. Then, we will explore which of a patient’s medications used before the hip fracture are continued or discontinued in the post-acute care SNF setting. This project will provide proof of concept, preliminary data, and an established track record for the team to enhance an R21 proposal on discontinuing medications during transitions of care.

In our application of interest, we observe data on children diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Patients move through a sequence of treatment courses, with physicians deciding the next treatment given response to past treatments. Our goal is to answer important clinical questions: what would, say, 2-year survival rate have been had patients followed one treatment sequence versus another? Is there an “optimal” sequence that maximizes 2-year survival? In practice, confounding impedes direct attribution of survival improvements purely to the treatment sequence. For example, patients following less aggressive sequences may have better cardiac function throughout and, therefore, better survival prospects even had they followed another sequence. Moreover, adjusting for confounders (e.g. cardiac function) is difficult since they are irregularly measured over time – yielding incomplete information. We propose modeling the decision process via robust, state-of-the-art Bayesian machine learning (ML) methods which simultaneously adjust for confounding and sequentially impute missing values over time. Though motivated by AML, potential applications range from health policy to economics. For instance, public health policies are often rolled out sequentially (e.g. statewide vaccination done county-by-county) and we may be interested in estimating an optimal rollout schedule. Economists often model sequential pricing decisions as firms respond to competitors, with the goal of estimating an optimal pricing strategy. This proposal therefore has intrinsic merit and potential for broad impact in addressing complexities encountered across a range of interdisciplinary areas. Moreover, our findings will help launch a broader future research program developing Bayesian ML methods for sequential decision-making.

Deep learning has revolutionized modern technology and is one of the most exciting areas of research. Despite its grand technological impact, the foundational principles that govern learning and generalization of deep neural networks (DNN) are not understood. With traditional mathematically rigorous techniques failing to provide new insights, we propose to view DNNs as stochastic interacting systems compliant with the laws of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. We will develop new theoretical techniques, that cannot be directly borrowed from physics and will have to be built from the ground up, and experimental protocols that will determine the validity of the theory empirically both in toy and realistic DNNs, that result in a practical theory of deep learning. The DNNs will be viewed through the lens of condensed matter physics as a kind of material, whose properties we would like to predict. The proposed research will help to establish a group of physicists (faculty and students) interested in using their background to impact modern technology as well as in applying deep learning to physics problems as a tool. We hope to foster cross-department collaborations as our group grows. We are interested in adapting research direction to the important problems facing engineers and computer scientists. We also hope to take inspiration from the neurobiology research at CIBS. Natural science angle at deep learning is a very recent branch of research and its impact is hard to predict. Early investment in this research area will put Brown in the leading position in the years to come.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has infected more than 100 million people worldwide and claimed millions of lives. While the leading cause of mortality in COVID-19 patients is the hypoxic respiratory failure from acute respiratory distress syndrome, emerging evidence suggested that people with COVID-19 are prone to experience thrombotic events, such as venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolism and arterial thrombosis, and develop cardiovascular complications. These findings raise attention about appropriate disease management to prevent or treat thrombosis for COVID-19 patients. Clinical data indicated that all the three factors of Virchow’s triad, namely stasis, endothelial injury and  hypercoagulable state, are likely to contribute to the increased risk for thrombosis in COVID-19. Here, we propose to develop a novel computational framework to simulate the undesired thrombosis in microcirculation, a prominent clinical feature of COVID-19. This new framework will integrate seamlessly the four key components in the process of clotting in hemostasis, including hemodynamics, transport of coagulation factors and coagulation kinetics, blood cell mechanics and platelet adhesive dynamics, such that we can dissect the complicated process of pathological thrombus formation in COVID-19 and investigate its underlying mechanism. Our simulation results can help to improve our understanding of the pathogenesis of hypercoagulability, identify the key factor that triggers thrombus formation and provide insights to explore new therapeutic approaches for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19-associated thrombosis.

The recent discovery of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) has opened a new chapter for material engineering and quantum science researches. It is demonstrated that a flat superlattice miniband emerges when two sheets of graphene are rotated by a so-called “magic angle”, giving rise to numerous novel emergent phenomena in the quantum limit, such as correlated insulators, superconductivity and intrinsic magnetism. These discoveries have set off a “gold rush” in studying quantum phenomena in magic-angle tBLG for the following reasons: (i) the fact that a potentially unconventional superconducting phase is stabilized by a simple “twist” in graphene offers renewed hope that experimental study could provide a full understanding of unconventional superconductivity, which will potentially revolutionize our approach to building a quantum computer; (ii) rotational alignment between 2-dimensional layered materials provide a new method to engineer material properties, introducing an unexplored landscape for future research; (iii) twisted 2D materials feature novel magnetic properties with versatile experimental controls, which holds the promise of unlocking new generations of computational technologies. The PI’s group at Brown University has recently developed a new device structure and demonstrated the capability of directly probing and controlling electron correlation within twisted 2D materials. In this proposal, the PI plans to utilize the same device structure to examine the pairing symmetry of the superconducting phase in magic-angle tBLG. The proposed project will provide important constraints for theoretical models aiming to accurately describe superconductivity in magic-angle tBLG.

Exposure notification technology allows a public health app running on a personal device to discover that it had been in contact with an individual who later tested positive for an infectious disease, and notify its user of the prior exposure. Existing approaches were designed with privacy and security in mind, however their privacy and security features can still be significantly improved. This project is about incorporating state-of-the art cryptographic approaches for privacy-preserving authentication into exposure notification schemes.

The availability of single-cell measurements provides a fine-grained heterogeneous cell landscape revealing developmental trajectories across time for diverse cell types. Studying these cell development trajectories gives us a better understanding of gene misregulation, leading to a diseased state in the cell. However, due to technical limitations, researchers can only observe this development at specific time-points or stages. We propose to use deep-learning models to fill this information gap by generating realistic in silico gene expression measurements. These measurements will be produced for missing time-points to augment the single-cell trajectory data, allowing improved downstream biological analyses. Recently, due to the generation of a large number of datasets, cutting-edge advancements in deep learning have been applied to the single-cell domain. However, the existing methods fail to factor in the temporal structure (time-point information) in the data - an important signal for observing cell development in single-cells. We will model the temporal information in the single-cell gene expression experiments using auto-encoders and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We will also extend our framework to use the existing chromatin accessibility experiments to integrate spatial information (related to active and inactive regions in the DNA) in single cells. We hypothesize that the accurate modeling of the underlying biology will produce high-quality measurements for unobserved time-points. Understanding how genes are regulated across space and time is an important question for researchers in the field (including at Brown). We aim to leverage the existing information using data-driven deep learning methods to help answer it for single-cell development.

Due to the increased use and misuse of antibiotics in the last decades, many pathogenic strains have developed resistance to these agents, which has led to a global public health crisis. This can only amplify, particularly in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, which often results in secondary bacterial infections that need to be treated. Unfortunately, our current arsenal of antibiotics is failing. We therefore propose to develop an inhibitor of molecular evolution, which administered in combination with existing, well-characterized antibiotics could extend the time window of their efficacy, would help curb the development of resistance and would help combat infections to a variety of pathogens. To this end, we will target the pro-mutagenic processes mediated by the transcription-repair coupling factor Mfd for inhibition, and will employ a combination of in silico screening for inhibitory small-molecules and their testing in vitro and in vivo using orthogonal functional assays. Our proposal puts forth a novel, innovative angle of attack of the problem of antimicrobial resistance, and opens the avenue to the development of a broad-spectrum agent to effectively combat the pressing public health issue of antimicrobial resistance.

The ability to identify and track the physical objects discussed in a conversation is critical for humans at all stages of development, from children’s learning of new words and concepts, to adults’ abilities to sustain communication with each other. Despite the pivotal role this ability plays in multiple domains of cognition, core research areas within cognitive science do not align in how they think this process of “referent identification” works, or what auxiliary capacities it involves. Moreover, because different theories are siloed in different fields, their incompatibility has gone unnoticed and their differential predictions remain untested. In this project, we compare the two leading perspectives on referent identification—one from developmental psychology and the other from linguistic semantics—in terms of their predictions for children’s behavior. We develop a novel experimental paradigm, the “referent-transformation task”, which will probe the divergent predictions of these theories in both child and adult populations. Findings from this study will inform the scientific understanding of the development of referential communication. The project promises to advance Brown’s position in multiple fields of study – linguistics and psychology – by synthesizing theories and phenomena across fields for the first time, using an innovative empirical method.

Gene regulatory mechanisms are critical for proper cellular and protein function, and numerous pathologies have been linked to dysregulation of these processes. CRISPR-Cas9 has potential to modify disease-causing genes, but is prone to off-target alterations due to poor temporal control of its expression. It is therefore desirable to develop a "controllable" Cas9 that elicits no function unless activated, circumventing this limitation. Cas9 is reliant on conformational dynamics for allosteric function, but prior studies offer little mechanistic insight, necessitating new approaches such as solution NMR and molecular simulations to generate atomistic maps of dynamic networks within the protein. We recently identified a pathway of millisecond timescale protein motions spanning several domains of Cas9 that computational results suggest is a portion of a larger allosteric network that controls Cas9 function. My laboratory aims to illuminate regions of allosteric crosstalk that may become functional handles for enhanced spatial and temporal resolution of Cas9 with an integrated approach of solution structural biology, in silico biophysics, and in vivo biochemistry. We will (1) establish the mechanism of inter-domain signaling between multiple subdomains of Cas9 and (2) characterize allosteric mutants of Cas9 that are known to alter its specificity. This project will probe multi-timescale conformational dynamics in Cas9, revealing specific amino acids responsible for transmitting biological information throughout its structure. Understanding the way in which the spatially distinct domains of Cas9 are functionally coupled has exciting potential for precision medicine and bioengineering applications.

It is a commonplace today that empire was integral to the making of the industrial revolution in Great Britain. But the connection is far less obvious in other parts of Europe. In German central Europe especially, the history of industrialization continues to be told as a tale of technological prowess, coal and steel, and cultural particularity—the vaunted Weberian ‘Protestant’ work-ethic. The Migrant’s Spirit offers a much-needed corrective to such economic nationalism. While innovation, steel, and industriousness were undoubtedly key to Germany’s development in its later stages, in this book I argue that their role has been overstated in service of a history that downplays the region’s profound connections to and dependence upon violent colonial settler projects in the Americas. Between the 1810s and 1890s, some five million Germans emigrated to the ‘new world.’ Using a narrative approach that reconstructs the dynamics within extended families who lived scattered across Europe and North America, the book reveals how ordinary emigrants, rather than mere victims of an extant industrialization process, became an inadvertent driving force behind that very process. By reconstructing the transatlantic lives of working families, the book sheds new light on longstanding puzzles in the literature on industrial revolution, including questions about sudden shifts in norms governing work and domesticity that helped to mobilize an agrarian society for an industrial production regime. As such, my research compels us to re-imagine the geography of industrialization in Europe as one intricately tied to, and indeed determined by, the geography of mass migration overseas.

One of the most important Medieval French literary texts is the Roman de la Rose, an allegorical dream vision that narrates the development of love and the dreamer’s attempts to gain his lady’s affection. This text was wildly popular, frequently imitated, and highly controversial, with many important literary debates on its merits and faults arising after its publication, and enduring over many centuries. A relatively unknown work that also engages with the formative tradition of courtly love, directly cites the Rose, and recounts a similar story—though its intrigue swirls around a pear instead of a rose—is the Medieval courtly romance Li Romanz de la Poire [The Romance of the Pear]. The Poire reflects the principal allegorical tropes of Medieval love literature, while deftly managing various intertextual strands from Classical and Troubadouric traditions. In particular, the Poire is highly metaliterary, and stages many scenes in which the exemplarity of other texts is discussed and weighed. Given its capacious treatment of various literary traditions, discussion of traditional representations of love in art, literature, and music, and its vibrant illustrations, Li Romanz de la Poire is a crucial document for better understanding Medieval literature and culture. I am proposing the first English translation and critical edition of the Poire to make it accessible for scholars and students. My translation, along with annotated commentary on the original and critical essays, would offer a significant contribution to Medieval scholarship at Brown by directing attention to a pivotal, but heretofore inaccessible and understudied text.

The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader collects perspectives on adoption in the humanities in a single volume for researchers discovering the field or those wanting a convenient collection of foundational scholarly materials for teaching or reference. Its humanities perspective sets it apart from the recent Routledge Handbook to Adoption whose focus is psychology and sociology, and makes it the first of its kind to collect scholarly chapters, essays, and excerpts arranged around the central questions humanities scholars ask about representations of adoption, as a complex practice of family-making, in art, philosophy, the law, history, literature, political science, and other humanities disciplines. As a key tool in supporting and fostering a new generation of critical adoption scholars, The Reader includes foundational work by critics and theorists such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Margaret Jacobs, Arissa Oh, Marianne Novy, and Kori Graves, and will find audiences here and abroad among professional academic researchers and graduate students (recent graduates include Kira Donnell [Berkeley], Emily Bartz [Texas A/M], and Mette Kim-Larsen [Columbia]), and in undergraduate humanities programs where such courses are routinely taught, as at Princeton (Marina Fedosik), MIT (Sally Haslanger), Yale (Margaret Homans), and now here at Brown. This project will advance Brown's growing position at the center of this field, furthered with my hire: I edit the journal of record, edit the field's book series at The Ohio State University Press, sit on the executive board of the field's central organization, and am planning a symposium and conference at Brown as well.

This study, the first of its kind, aims to critically explore the life of Tito P. Achong, Mayor of Port of Spain, Trinidad, from 1941-1943, anti-colonial theoretician and agitator and inveterate champion of public health reform, who has been sidelined in modern histories of Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean. I hope to unravel and understand the complicated intersections in his career, including the impact of his time studying at Tennessee’s all Black Knoxville College, the influence of revolutionary Chinese politics on his formation and his relationship to radical anti-colonial trends and personalities in Trinidad. Among the questions I pose are: what drove him from poverty in rural Trinidad to the heights of academic success in the USA, then back home, where he eventually became Mayor of Port of Spain? How did he assimilate and reconfigure the ideas of Marx, Garvey, Dubois and Sun Yat Sen among others, to his own purposes? How did his philosophy conform and contrast with others in a country and period that produced globally significant scholar-activists such as CLR James, George Padmore, Claudia Jones and Eric Williams? What was the impact of his unrelenting political engagement on his family and how might we use Achong’s life to engage with patriarchy and gender inequality in the first half of the century? Finally, how can we think about the silences and exclusions in Caribbean and African Diaspora history to explain how he faded from both national life and the scholarly gaze in the decades since then?

Moral Depths focuses on the extraordinary recent discovery of the tomb of the forefather of Chinese archaeology, Lü Dalin (d. 1093), in what is to date the largest and most complete medieval family cemetery ever uncovered in China. Tracing the ways in which Lü and his family excavated, documented, and reburied ancient vessels with their dead, and the ways in which contemporary archaeologists are now re-excavating these same vessels in pursuit of the origins of their discipline, the project stages an ethical debate between past and present ways of seeking the past in things. It mobilizes this debate both as an intervention into contemporary scholarship on muzang yishu (burial art), and, more generally, as an opportunity to reflect on our collective moral obligations to the distant dead. The grant will support my ongoing participation in an international research and exhibition project on the cemetery, and will facilitate remote and on-site investigation of a related site—the Forest of Steles (Beilin). Established as a resource for scholars by Lü Dalin and his brothers in the eleventh century, the “Forest” features thousands of inscribed steles gathered from sites across the country in what is, arguably, China’s oldest “museum.” Integrating this site will elaborate the museological implications of the project’s dialogue between past and present pasts, and thereby culminate the final chapter of my second book project—Moral Depths: Making Antiquity in a Medieval Chinese Cemetery.

This born-digital publication developed under the auspices of the University's Mellon Foundation-supported Digital Publications Initiative, brings together American and Japanese scholars and artists to reexamine the legacy of one of Japan’s most influential poets, Chika Sagawa (1911–1936), largely ignored by critics and known within the Japanese poetry community as “everyone’s favorite unknown poet.” The first extensive study of any female modernist poet in Japan, the digital publication widens and deepens our understanding of literary developments in Japan in the 1920s via a necessarily “anti-orientalist” reading of literary culture. The importance and impact of this project, however, extends beyond a re-presentation of Japanese literature through the lens of global modernism. As a cross-disciplinary, multimodal digital publication, The Past and Future of Chika Sagawa forges connections between contemporary arts communities (poets, visual artists, and sound artists) that are actively engaged with Sagawa’s poetry. Enhancing the multidisciplinary dimension of the project, a video recording of a specially organized taidan, or formal conversation, provides dynamic content to sit alongside Sagawa’s poetry, accompanying interpretive texts by US-based scholars, and newly commissioned electro-acoustic and visual works. Moreover, as a bilingual university press publication, The Past and Future of Chika Sagawa will foster critical exchanges between American and Japanese scholars and artists and will be beneficial to both Anglophone and Japanese audiences. As such, the digital publication has the potential to significantly elevate the stature and historical importance of Sagawa’s poetry in the widest possible context.

In the United States, nearly one quarter of women giving birth were born outside of the United States, and an estimated one out of every 16 births in the country is to an undocumented immigrant mother. While most low-income women are eligible for Medicaid during and after pregnancy, in many states low-income undocumented and recent immigrants are not eligible for pregnancy Medicaid and are covered instead by less generous programs which often do not cover postpartum care. This project will begin by documenting state public insurance coverage policies for pregnant and postpartum immigrant women and by generating a novel dataset that links population representative survey data from postpartum moms with maternal place of birth as documented on birth certificate records. Using these resources, we will examine whether postpartum outcomes vary between foreign-born and US-born low-income women and will examine the relationship between state public coverage policies for pregnant and postpartum immigrant women and disparities in postpartum care between foreign and US-born women. The results of this study will provide information to public health practitioners and policy makers about whether there are disparities in health care use after pregnancy between immigrant women and women born in the United States. Further, this study will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between state insurance coverage policies for pregnant and postpartum immigrant women and postpartum health care use.

Despite significant advances in surgical and chemotherapy-based treatments, ovarian cancer remains the most lethal gynecologic malignancy. The overall 5-year survival rate still remains dismally low at 45% as most patients develop drug resistance and relapse. There is a significant medical need to develop second line of therapies. Recent progress in immunotherapeutic approaches based on using patients’ own immune system to fight against cancers have proven effective against multiple tumor types. Studies in animal models and humans clearly show that cytotoxic CD8 T lymphocytes are effective against ovarian tumor. But often the CD8 T cell numbers are low and their quality is negatively impacted by the highly immunosuppressive ovarian tumor microenvironment. Our proposal relies on a newly recognized subset of memory T cells called, resident memory CD8 T cells in the ovarian tumor microenvironment. Resident memory T cells are primarily described in infectious disease settings where they maintain heightened cytotoxicity and also produce copious amounts of inflammatory cytokines and chemokines after stimulation. We want to leverage these T cells’ immunostimulatory properties to generate a broad antitumor reaction. Using a mouse orthotopic ovarian cancer model we will evaluate the effect of local resident memory T cell stimulation on activation of other immune cells present in the tumor stroma. We expect a broad activation will convert the suppressive tumor microenvironment to an immunostimulatory milieu and will enable potent synergistic antitumor action by multiple immune cell type. When combined with existing first line therapies this approach has the potential to enable durable cure.

The human polyomavirus JC (JCPyV) infects a significant proportion of the general population worldwide. Initial infection is asymptomatic, and the virus is thought to establish a life-long persistent infection in the kidney of healthy individuals. Under conditions of immune suppression, JCPyV can reactivate and cause progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), an often fatal demyelinating disease of the brain. The mechanism by which JCPyV evades the barriers that protect the brain and then destroys glial cells is currently unknown. We recently discovered that primary choroid plexus epithelial cells (CPE), the cells that create the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier, are susceptible to virus infection. In addition, infected CPE produce abundant amounts of extracellular vesicles (EV) containing virus that can infect naïve glial cells, the target cells of PML, providing a pathway for the virus to travel from the periphery to the brain. Here, we hypothesize that EV derived from JCPyV-infected human CPE contain specific microRNAs (miRNAs) and proteins that mediate cell–cell communication and promote viral pathogenesis in recipient glial cells.  We will test this hypothesis by first comparing the contents of infected vs. uninfected CPE-derived EV, then by functional analysis of these components in our viral infection system. The results of this study should lead to a greater understanding of JCPyV-induced brain disease and to the identification of biomarkers to better predict which patients are at risk for developing PML.

Investigating the conformational and global dynamics of proteins using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is a critical focus area in computational biology. However, most MD simulations of proteins are currently performed under equilibrium conditions, whereas biological proteins typically exist in the presence of chemical concentration gradients, which affect protein dynamics through electrokinetic and steric interactions. Non-equilibrium MD simulations are impractical with most standard simulation packages, because the wide-spread use of periodic boundary conditions drives the dynamics toward equilibrium, and non-equilibrium phenomena of interest often occur on long time scales. In this project, we propose to overcome these challenges by implementing novel force models in the boundary regions of MD simulations to drive the dynamics toward predictable non-equilibrium states. We will use these tools to simulate the protein dynamics in solute concentration gradients and characterize the role of protein/solute interactions on the conformational and global dynamics of proteins. Ultimately, the development of these methods and tools will facilitate new investigations into the non-equilibrium global and conformational dynamics of single- and multi-protein systems, with potential applications to protein phase separation and the formation of membraneless organelles. The tools and research proposed here have broad applications to quantitative and computational biology, especially towards advancing our understanding of the role of non-equilibrium processes on protein dynamics and aggregation that critically contribute towards cell physiology and disease. Furthermore, this research will facilitate the development of new biomedical technologies and applications involving the selective control and measurement of multi-protein systems, such as protein detection, sorting, and pre-concentration.

The goal of this project is to address key challenges for contemporary chronically implanted neurotechnologies through innovative design and use of complex, integrated 3-D probe architectures enabling enhanced, scalable spatial access to the brain while limiting implant size and invasiveness. In contrast to traditional approaches obtaining at best, two-dimensional access to neural signals from the cortex, we aim to engineer in this project, a cortical probe platform enabling high-density and high-resolution, three-dimensional access to large cortical volumes.  We propose to leverage advanced microfabrication techniques to directly integrate 3-D “microneedle” probes with high-performance, integrated electronic chips for measuring and modulating neural activity, thereby eliminating the need for tedious and failure-prone interconnects. Additionally, we plan to customize these probes at a micrometer-scale resolution to yield multi-site constructs which may be used to investigate a novel concept of spatially-compressive, columnar- composite neural sensing as a mechanism to enrich the information content for high-performance neural decoding in the context of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs). Key advancements from the proposed technological platform are anticipated to produce a significantly enhanced brain implant, appropriate for real-time neural interface applications. Brown University has been a long-standing pioneer in the fields of Neuroengineering and BCIs, and this endeavor will continue to solidify its conceptual and engineering leadership in this community.

The proposed research focuses on the spreading of chemicals and particles in small-scale fluid flows for a range of applications. As fluid moves down a pipe or channel, it is known that the combined effects of fluid transport and molecular diffusion lead to an enhanced spreading of an initial concentration of a solute, an effect now known as “Taylor Dispersion.” For many applications this enhanced spreading leads to a rapid dilution of a chemical compound which is undesirable. In the first two sub-projects of the proposed work, novel methods will be investigated for reducing or otherwise controlling dispersion in microchannels through surface modification and mechanical deformation of the channel walls. These methods are readily transferable to standard microfluidic manufacturing processes and thus have the potential for immediate impact on technology. In the the third sub-project, we will investigate the dispersion of elongated nano-scale particles, specifically self-assembled “nanorods,” directly relevant to promising new technologies for targeted drug delivery. The outputs of these projects will contribute to numerous related scientific and technological fields and facilitate future projects and collaborations.

Comprehensive data protection laws such as the European Union's recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) better protect citizens' sensitive data, but impose a high cost for compliance on organizations that operate digital services. The expense comes partly because retrofitting compliance onto current computer systems is difficult, manual, and time-consuming. In this project, we seek to understand where current software abstractions and common practices come into conflict with laws like the GDPR, and to develop new computer systems designs that address these problems and make data protection a primary design concern. One example will restructure the databases that web services use today as federations of per-user micro-databases. Users can add or remove their personal micro-database at any time, and all data related to them are stored in their personal micro-database. Applications combine users' information by computing derived views over these micro-databases, and update them as the underlying set of subscribed micro-databases changes. We hope to build a Brown-based research group that turns this idea into a real system, and to build collaborations both with industry and non-CS academics interested in data protection. Brown currently has isolated centers of interest in data protection legislation and its impact, including in Computer Science, the Watson Institute, the STS program, the Policy Lab and others. This project will bring these groups together, introduce industry and off-campus perspectives, establish Brown as a household name in this emerging field of research, foster interdisciplinary thinking in the Brown spirit, and seek to create new technology that makes data protection a primary design goal.

Nature builds functionality using soft hydrogel like materials and relies on linear or complex hierarchical assemblies to scale-up forces and energy in an efficient manner. An integrated computational and experimental research is proposed to scientifically develop an energy-harvesting hydrogel-based hierarchical material structure that draws inspiration from naturally occurring biological materials, structures and mechanisms. The proposed research could enable the design of hydrogel-based hierarchical assemblies that continuously convert chemical energy into mechanical energy by exploiting the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. This research aims to identify molecular architectural concepts that enhance the power density obtained from self-oscillating hydrogels using the BZ reaction, and develop hierarchical soft materials based structures which can scale-up mechanical energy. Molecular dynamics simulations will be conducted to develop a fundamental understanding of the role of polymer molecular architecture in oscillating energy density output from the BZ reaction. Experiments informed by electric eels micro compartment design and a coupled multi-physics continuum model will be developed to obtain a hierarchical hydrogel structure for energy harvesting and scale-up. The scientific understanding relating molecular structure and swelling-deswelling response of hydrogels and hierarchical self-oscillating energy harvesting hydrogel structure developed as part of this research will be a fundamental advancement in basic energy sciences frontier material research.

The unlikely combination of Nigeria’s postcolonial military complex, restrictive postcolonial gender norms and postwar youth disaffection inspired the birth of an insurgent group of female singers and dancers in the 1970s. Scarcely educated and from poor and working-class backgrounds, the “Afrobeat Queens” (as this group of artists became known) carved out a distinct space of female rebellion in Nigeria’s popular music industry. Quite predictably, the Queens’ eroticized stage performances and their support of a musical genre that propagated anti-establishment sentiments elicited the contempt of Nigeria’s elite class. Powerful social actors consequently enacted state-sanctioned violence against the Queens, while also fomenting their erasure from scholarly and popular histories of Afrobeat music or African popular culture. In this study, Ayobade combines oral historical and archival methods to reconstruct the Queens’ sustained use of popular performance as tool and platform for social critique and self-affirmation in the face of intersecting gendered constraints. In what would become the first book-length study of this iconic group of women, Ayobade pursues a feminist reading of the Queen’s craft as critical punctuations of a male-dominated cultural scene that was being consolidated in the wake of colonialism.

This film project (a trilogy) studies and compares two trajectories of migration, which are thought as unrelated and are often studied separately by scholars from different disciplines in the humanities, art and social sciences. The first migration is that of objects that generated professional care, scrupulous documentation, generous hospitality in museums and archives, and occasional public display. The second is the migration of people, who do not have, never had, or are unable to obtain the documents without which they are banned from access to most kinds of care and hospitality, and from rebuilding their homes and worlds. The publication last year of the Sarr-Savoy report on the objects plundered by the French empire and held in French public collections, testifies to the timely trait of this project of Un-Documented, that brings to this global conversation about restitution a unique point of view that connect together the objects in questions and people (in their place of origins and diaspora). This project has emerged out of years of research and a book project, published this November by Verso. The trilogy is based on the idea that artifacts preserved in Western type museums can no longer be treated only as exemplary masterpieces but can serve as site for renewed rights. This year I completed the first part of this trilogy, that is being shown now in The Fundació Tàpies. This award will enable work on the second and third parts of the trilogy.

This award will advance an ongoing study investigating the growing participation of scientific, medical, legal and agronomic experts in the grassroots movement against glyphosate pesticide use in Argentina’s soy-producing regions. The movement holds great political significance, not just in Argentina, but globally, as farmworkers and agricultural communities around the world protest the skyrocketing use of glyphosate pesticides and the frightening impacts of long-term exposure to these dangerous chemicals. The study, which promises to shed light on the epistemic structure and dynamics of social movements, represents an international collaboration undertaken with Professor Florencia Arancibia, a political sociologist at Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is supported by a two-year National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Award that began in September 2019. We are using the NSF award primarily to pay Dr. Arancibia’s salary and research and travel expenses during the data collection phase, which will extend through May 2020. I am seeking funding during a sabbatical leave that will allow me to make a month-long research trip to Buenos Aires in Fall 2020 to work directly with Professor Arancibia to develop a book prospectus, draft several manuscript chapters of a coauthored book, and convene a workshop to disseminate study results.

The Salomon award will support preliminary research for my second book project, “To Feel the Earth Move: Einstein on the Beach and Us.” This book will focus on a singular work from the history of 20th-century performance: Einstein on the Beach, the 4-hour-long experimental opera created by theatre director Robert Wilson, composer Philip Glass, and choreographer Lucinda Childs that was first performed in 1976. Rather than attempting to offer a comprehensive history of the work’s development, formal structure, or cultural impact, this book takes its cue from the formally innovative, radically conceived structure of the opera itself. In so doing, the book demonstrates how a single work of art can challenge audiences and scholars of performance to cultivate modes of critical attunement that open outward into broader, collectively shared histories and cultural inheritances. Einstein on the Beach constellates Cold War-era anxieties about technology and the threat of nuclear annihilation; the unfulfilled promise of the African American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s; avant-garde musical and theatrical techniques including seriality, minimalism, durational performance, and a range of non-Western cultural forms; and the complex role of artistic “outsiders” and the “amateurs” within the historically fraught negotiation between experimental and commercial models of artistic production. By strategically narrowing its critical aperture to a singular—if inexhaustibly complex—work of collaboratively realized performance, this book will help me advance Brown’s position in the field of theatre and performance studies by elaborating novel methods of “doing” performance criticism.

My research focuses on a 12-day trip that the American poet Robert Frost took to the USSR in the late summer of 1962. The idea for the trip was hatched by the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and JFK’s Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall. The Kennedy administration endorsed the trip and the US State Department helped to organize it. In the USSR, leaders of the Writers’ Union welcomed Frost and introduced him to literary luminaries in Moscow and Leningrad. Frost also met directly with the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and shared his vision of a “friendly competition” in “sports, science, art, and democracy.” Udall met with Khrushchev separately. Frost, Udall, and Khrushchev seemed to agree that soft power was as important as hard power. Khrushchev apparently left his meeting with Frost determined to deepen the process of de-Stalinization in Soviet society. At the same time, the potential for the rivalry to turn violent was not far from the surface. As Khrushchev chatted with Frost and Udall, he was also coordinating the shipment of nuclear missiles to Cuba. Studying this episode has the potential to re-balance our understanding of the Cold War by juxtaposing poetry with politics, cultural exchange with high-level personal diplomacy, and non-violent competition with brinkmanship. This award will fund research trips to relevant repositories in the United States (National Archives, Frost’s papers at Dartmouth, Stewart Udall’s papers in Arizona) and in Russia (the State, Party, Literature, and Foreign Policy Archives.)

This mixed methods research will examine the relationship between parents' educational attainment and students' post-secondary educational outcomes in Latinx families. The intergenerational transmission of educational advantage posits that all students with college-educated parents equally benefit from their parent's educational attainment. Yet research has long demonstrated differential returns to education across and race and ethnicity. Using data from theELS:2002 and looking at dual-headed households, the proposed quantitative study examines how Latinx student outcomes vary when both parents are college-educated, when neither parent is college-educated, and when one parent is college educated, but the other is not. Qualitatively, I propose an interview study that illuminates how Latinx college students from mixed-educated households navigate college settings at both selective and-selective campuses. Situated in cultural capital theory, this analysis contributes theoretical insights to understanding who and to what extent educational advantage is “passed on” from parent to child with a focus on the Latinx experience. This project innovates by problematizing the idea that having college-educated parents portends academic success, which may only be true for particular groups of students. Research has failed to consider important heterogeneity in student outcomes for those from mixed-educated families. This project contributes to the extant literature by bringing important attention to a group of students that are considered “advantaged” based on research and policy definitions, but whose outcomes may present a different picture. The focus on Latinx families and the theoretical insights derived from the study extend Brown's excellence in educational research with attention on an understudied population.

This award will support archaeological research on the effects of imperial forced resettlement on native Peruvian households, through the study of materials excavated from the site of Purun Llaqta del Maino (PLM). The region in which PLM is located, Chachapoyas, was home to a series of loosely confederated ethnic groups who built their homes in thousands of hilltop sites between 1100 and 1470CE, before the area was violently incorporated into the Inka empire (1470-1535CE). According to written sources, Inka officials radically reconfigured the regional landscape following its conquest, intensifying maize production and resettling tens of thousands of people into new towns. Then, following the Spanish invasion of 1532-35CE, clergy and administrators again reorganized local communities with the goal of reshaping their political subjectivities and directing their labor towards Spanish colonial projects. This history makes Chachapoyas an ideal context for studying how political subjects are shaped through distinct imperial discourses and how households respond to imperial challenges. My previous research at PLM indicates that the site was occupied from at least 1100-1600CE and includes a pre-Inka hilltop village, an Inka imperial feasting hall (kallanka), and a Spanish colonial planned town (reducción). Study of materials excavated in 2019 – plant and animal remains from houses, human remains from burials, and soils from adjacent abandoned fields – will enable us to assess how native households living at this site responded to two successive movements of imperial expansion and resettlement. Results will be incorporated into VanValkenburgh’s second book project, articles, and external funding applications.

A combination of exoticism, Western cultural prestige, and deeply-rooted inferiority has led to the re-creation of European-style villages built as exact copies outside major cities in China. The hope of using reproductions of European architecture and urban styles to revive and attract new settlements doesn’t always turn out well in reality. But it contributes to a direct clash of unrelated civilizations and cultures – a “new world” in denial of its own past seeking out different “old worlds.” Inspired by this cultural simulacra, I composed Transplant, Transpose for chamber ensemble with two renowned improvisors. The work was premiered at my American Academy in Berlin Portrait concert last spring. I’ve been thinking about ways to create a fuller version to more thoroughly express the ideas of the work. To enrich the sonic environment, I will extend the current version and add field recordings, common propaganda slogan announcements, excerpted interviews, and processed and distorted sounds as varied as Venetian gondola songs, Korean pop music, nighttime urban soundscapes from Paris and Shanghai, laughter and merriment celebrating western holidays, alphorns, car horns in traffic, local Chinese opera, etc. A visual component will consist of still photos. The Salomon award will aid in the studio recording and documentation of the final version of Transplant, Transpose. It will strongly represent Brown’s versatility and commitment towards the contemporary arts, and support a composer widely praised for her ability to comment on and synthesize the complexities and misconceptions of cultural exchange and modern life in her music.

Increasing opioid-related hospitalizations and emergency department visits among adults ≥65 years of age have been reported. Recent major federal efforts aim to improve the screening and management of opioid use disorder (OUD) in Medicare. The objective of this study is to understand the context of these hospitalizations with respect to the attributes of the patients, hospital admission, and the settings of care following opioid-related acute care use. We emphasize the skilled nursing facility (SNF) setting because it is a prominent care transition following hospitalization, and yet it is unclear if SNFs have the willingness, ability and/or capacity to manage OUD. The need for better integration of addiction treatment with both geriatric and post-acute medical care serves as the rationale of this study. To achieve the study goals, we will analyze administrative claims for 100% Medicare beneficiaries linked to nursing home assessments, and the Residential History File. The proposed research will provide data to promote awareness of OUD in SNFs, and among older adults, which can lead to improvements in clinical practice and policy to ensure appropriate monitoring and interventions are provided. Establishing and/or enhancing the capacity of SNFs to manage OUDs could improve resident quality of life and health outcomes while also contributing to national efforts to improve the management of OUD across different settings.

My proposal requests funding support to involve Brown students and recent alumni in the production of BACKLIGHT, a microbudget narrative film. Production (principal photography) will take place in Providence this summer. Brown students and alumni will fill numerous crew and cast positions, working with professionals in key creative, technical and organizational roles who will provide guidance and training, and help ensure a safe and professional working and learning environment. In my 25 years of teaching filmmaking and screenwriting, first at RISD and since 2013 at Brown, students have been substantially involved in all of my filmmaking, including three feature films and several shorts. A Salomon Research Award would enable me to formalize and support the involvement of Brown students and recent grads in this project, and help address a substantial demand for learning through hands-on production experiences. Funding would go towards production expenses and stipends, and help to make internship opportunities accessible to students with financial need. Low-budget, professional-level filmmaking, which gives young filmmakers direct on-set experiences and mentorship, has been especially hampered by the pandemic, resulting in few opportunities for this type of learning. This project will help fill this gap, bringing groups of students and professionals together for the multifaceted and intensively collaborative experience of film production.