Eight projects have been awarded funding for 2013-14 through the Graduate College’s Focal Point initiative, designed to engage faculty members and graduate students in new collaborations that explore the interfaces between disparate fields of scholarship. Projects also allow graduate students to engage directly in the process of developing new research directions in areas of critical national and human need – including how to identify, define and frame new research.
The projects:
- “Access to Success: Developing Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Domestic Minorities in Online Graduate Education” (co-sponsored with the Collaborative for Research on Educational Innovation and Technology); faculty members Denice Hood (education policy, organization and leadership), Faye Lesht (EPOL and the head of Academic Outreach at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning), and Linda Smith, an associate dean (Graduate School of Library and Information Science); and graduate students Randi Congleton and Adam Rusch (EPOL)
- “Bilingualism: Cognition, Culture, Computation”; faculty members Rakesh Bhatt (linguistics), Pamela Hadley (speech and hearing science), Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (electrical and computer engineering) and Silvina Montrul (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese/linguistics); and graduate students Amit Das (ECE), Ning Hsu (speech and hearing science), Itxaso Rodriguez (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) and Kevin Stillwell (linguistics)
- “Illinois Health and Nutrition – Building Healthy Communities”; Nora Few (executive assistant dean for the College of Medicine), faculty member Gregory Freund (nutritional sciences) and graduate students Miri Kim (neuroscience/Medical Scholars Program) and Morgan Moon (nutritional sciences/Medical Scholars Program)
- “Incarceration in America: Family and Community Impacts”; faculty members Rebecca Ginsburg (EPOL/landscape architecture) and Anke Pinkert (Germanic languages and literatures); and graduate students Chung Ga-Young (EPOL) and Sheri-Lynn Kurisu (sociology)
- “Interactions Design and Engineering of Adaptive Systems” (co-sponsored with the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership); faculty members Timothy Bretl (aerospace engineering), Scott Carney and Doug L. Jones (ECE), Florin Dolcos (psychology) and Cliff Shin (industrial design); and graduate students Ben Childester, Erik Johnson and David Jun (ECE), Jamie Norton (neuroscience) and Woonhong Yeo (materials science and engineering)
- “Integration of Biological, Mathematical and Engineering Approaches to the Management of Mosquito-Borne Disease: An Interdisciplinary Global Challenge”; faculty members Carla Caceres (animal biology/Program in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology), Marilyn O’Hara (pathobiology/Program in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology); and graduate students Allie Gardner (entomology) and Phong Le (civil and environmental engineering)
- “Re-imagining Education: Integrating Youth Culture Across Educational Contexts for Black and Latino Youth”; faculty members Anne Haas Dyson (EPOL) and Gilberto Rosas (anthropology Latina/Latino Studies); and graduate students Eduardo Coronel (EPOL), Emily Gates (educational psychology), Megan-Brette Hamilton (speech and hearing science), Bryce Henson (Institute of Communications Research), Kyle Mays (history) and Gabriel Rodriguez (EPOL)
- “Visualization and Quantification of Dance Mechanics for Alternate Approaches to STEM Education”; faculty members Armand Beaudoin (mechanical science and engineering) and Kirstie Simson (dance); and graduate students Bruno Azeredo (mechanical science and engineering) and Jenny Angelica Angulo Soledad (dance)
More information about Focal Point, including past projects, is online.
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