by Currently
August 3rd 2020
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Every week during the academic year, Currently celebrates faculty and staff accomplishments, including appearances on panels, presentations, recent publications or performances, and research grants.
- Lindsay Benstead, Middle East Studies Center director and political science faculty; Evan Kristof, civil and environmental engineering adjunct faculty; Yasin Tunc, curriculum and instruction faculty; and Tien James, business faculty, were awarded participation in the multi-year Stevens Initiative Connected Classrooms virtual exchange program through the through the Aspen Institute and the U.S. Dept of State. This inaugural program engages 25 faculty scholars selected from ten participating universities to adopt and implement virtual exchange using the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) model. Faculty participate in five training workshops, led by a team of experienced trainers from the United States, the Middle East and North Africa. This two-year faculty training and implementation program is spearheaded by the Stevens Initiative. Faculty are matched with faculty in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to teach a COIL course in the next academic year. The first workshop began in June and will complete this fall.
- Paula Carder, Institute on Aging director, is co-investigator on a National Institute on Aging-funded study titled “Do State Regulations Affect the Outcomes of Assisted Living Residents with Dementia?” The team received a COVID-19 supplement to examine state-level regulations for infection control, epidemic and pandemic prevention and response in assisted living facilities.
- Feng Liu, computer science faculty; Christof Teuscher, engineering and computer science faculty; Jay L Nadeau, physics faculty; Bruno Jedynak, mathematics and statistics faculty; Steve L. Reichow, chemistry faculty; and William Garrick, OIT research computing manager and architect, have been awarded a two-year, $395,926 National Science Foundation grant for a high-performance GPU-based computing cluster. The funding will allow PSU to acquire GPU-enabled servers and storage. Specifically, the proposed infrastructure includes 4 nodes with 4 NVIDIA Titan RTX and 768 GB RAM, 16 nodes with 4 RTX 2080 Ti, 12 with 192 GB RAM, and 4 with 384 GB RAM, and 480 TB usable storage. The requested resources will augment and enhance the existing computational resources at Portland State University and will benefit researchers as well as students.
- Amy Lubitow, sociology faculty; Marisa Zapata, Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative director and Urban Studies faculty; and Miriam Abelson, women, gender, and sexuality studies faculty, were awarded $93,000 in funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities for a project titled “Marginalized Populations’ Access to Transit: Journeys from Home and Work to Transit.” Ivis Garcia, University of Utah, is also involved in the project.
- Max Nielsen-Pincus, environmental science and management faculty, and Cody Evers, environmental science and management research associate, received a $78,500 grant from the USDA Forest Service through their Joint Venture Agreement to research “Integrating Empirical and Simulation Models to Analyze and Communicate Trends in Community Wildfire Risk in the US” with the Rocky Mountain Research Station.
- Max Nielsen-Pincus, environmental science and management faculty, received a $35,016 grant from the USDA Forest Service through their Joint Venture Agreement to research “Co-Management of Fire Risk Transmission” with the Rocky Mountain Research Station.
- Federico Pérez, Honors College faculty, was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2020-2021 to support his project “Urbanism as Warfare: Knowledge, (In)security, and the Remaking of Downtown Bogotá.”
- Daniel Taylor-Rodriguez, statistics faculty, is a co-investigator on a five-year, $3.4 million research proposal titled “Assessment of Anomia: Improving Efficiency and Utility Using Item Response Theory,” funded by the National Institutes of Health.
- Melissa Thompson, Lindsey Wilkinson, and Maura Kelly, sociology faculty, received $15,000 in funding from the Faculty Development Program for their project titled “Construction Trades Training Among Criminal-Justice Supervised Individuals.”