UPDATE: FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS AND AWARDS

In this, the first of a three-part series, Bryn Mawr Now gives readers an overview of recent awards to support research by members of the faculty. Today, we’ll take a brief look at projects developed by Professor of Mathematics Paul Melvin, Professor of Social Work and Social Research Leslie Alexander and Lecturer in Philosophy Kenneth Richman, and Assistant Professor of Spanish H. Rosi Song. For a more complete list of grants and awards made to faculty members during the 2003-04 academic year, see the Provost’s Web page.

Professor of Mathematics Paul Melvin was awarded $136,240 by the National Science Foundation in support of his project entitled "FRG Topological Invariants of 3 and 4 Manifolds.”

Melvin’s project uses the tools of quantum topology, a mathematical theory developed over the last decade, to address a problem that mathematicians have been trying to solve since the turn of the 20th century. Quantum topology applies techniques of quantum-field theory, and other, related theories developed by physicists to study the universe, to the study of manifolds, spaces that look relatively flat on a small scale but have a more complex global structure. Melvin’s project is part of the effort to classify the collection of all three-dimensional manifolds — which are potential models for the physical universe.

Professor of Social Work and Social Research Leslie Alexander and bioethicist Kenneth Richman, research associate in the Department of Philosophy, were awarded a $25,000 contract from the Office of Research Integrity, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They are developing a Web-based program to train personnel in community agencies in the protection of human subjects in research.

Many community-service agencies and advocacy groups engage in research about the populations they serve. It is common for such agencies, often working hand-in-hand with universities, to employ people who have little or no formal training in research ethics and methods. There are few published guidelines to help these members of the research team learn what they need to know about protecting the rights of the research subjects they recruit and interview. Alexander and Richman are developing an interactive Web site to train community-agency staffers in ethical research practices through scenarios that address situations likely to arise in community-based research settings.

Assistant Professor of Spanish H. Rosi Song has been awarded a matching grant of $2,000 from the Program for Cultural Cooperation, sponsored by Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, for a research project that examines the relationship between literature and the political consciousness of Spanish intellectuals during and after the Franco dictatorship.

Song travelled to Spain during the summer of 2003 to document the ways intellectuals continued their political engagement throughout the years of the repressive Franco regime. She gathered literary journals and magazines that provided a relatively safe haven for political discourse, either openly or under the rubric of literary criticism. Song expects that her examination of these primary sources will help her document her manuscript on the history of political commitment in 20th-century Spanish literature.

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