• CLA Discoveries
• About CLA
• Faculty, Teaching & Research
• Students
• In the Community
• Departments & Majors
• Alumni & Friends
• News & Events
  • CLA Events Calendar
  • For the Media
  • Reach Magazine
  • RSS Feeds
  • Publications & Social Media
• Giving to CLA

Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Winter 2003 : Serving communities & creating knowledge

CLA Faculty: Serving communities & creating knowledge

Research grants support discoveries that challenge prevailing orthodoxies and stretch the boundaries of what we know or even allow ourselves to think about. To say that CLA scholars create knowledge is not to say simply that they discover facts. It is to say that they contribute to the store of what we understand to be true about ourselves and about our world. Research not only adds to the storehouse of knowledge but creates new ways of seeing that open our eyes to discoveries that would not have been possible before.

The University of Minnesota is among the best among major research universities in the number of companies spun off from its discoveries, according to a 2000 national study. Of the 368 spinoff companies created in fiscal year 2000, the University of Minnesota was the fourth largest contributor in the nation. –Minneapolis Star Tribune

Faculty and departments in CLA received more than $14.3 million in grant funding for fiscal year 2002. That's compared with $11.1 million last fiscal year.

Funders and recipients include:

National Institutes of Health (NIH)—-$7,117,222

$1.4 million went to sociology professors Jeylan Mortimer, Scott Eliason, Douglas Hartmann, Erin Kelly, I. Ross Macmillan and Christopher Uggen—from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—to support their "Youth Development Study,” part of a project focused on youth work experience and mental health. Recent findings suggest that working part-time in high school may improve how young adults cope with job stress.

National Science Foundation (NSF)—$4,590,098

$150,000 went to Eugene Borgida (professor of psychology, Fesler Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs) and John L. Sullivan (Regents' Professor of political science, Arleen Carlson Chair in American Government) for their project, "Electronic Networks and Civic Life: A Longitudinal Study." In its fifth year, the project explores how norms of cooperation and civic and political culture address the "digital divide" in computer use and Internet access.

U.S. Department Of Education—$683,259

Andrew Cohen (ILES) is working with the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition to improve the quality of language teaching, learning, and assessment.

Sendero Group—$48,224

Gordon Legge (psychology) is extending existing way-finding technologies for people with visual impairments to indoor environments. A "digital sign system" helps people with tasks such as reading room numbers or signs and identifying landmarks in large office buildings.

U.S. Department of the Interior—$44,874

The Immigration History Research Center (Rudy Vecoli, director) is developing COLLAGE, a collection of digitized materials allowing students, educators, scholars, and the public to learn more about American immigration.

National Writing Project—$28,000

This grant to Lillian Bridwell-Bowles (English) will fund the Minnesota Writing Project's 13th annual Summer Institute—four-week intensive workshops that help K-12 and college teachers improve their teaching of writing.

Minnesota Dept. of Public Safety—$4,770

Using Computer-Aided Design, Frederick Cooper (classical & Near Eastern studies) is working with Laura Nelson at the Minneapolis Crime Lab to develop a system that will aid criminal and terrorist investigations by digitizing images of fragmented window glass and other surfaces.

National Inst. of Justice (U.S. Dept. of Justice)—$33,600

With this grant, Ian Ross McMillan (sociology) is developing a more complete picture of violence in women's lives. Using data from the National Violence Against Women Survey, the project will analyze patterns of sexual and non-sexual victimization of women, risk factors, and impacts.

National Science Foundation—$300,000+

With this multiyear grant, Beth Allen (economics) is working to improve the design of process planning systems in automated manufacturing. Process planning, which transforms a design into an ordered list of instructions for fabrication, can be time-consuming and expensive to develop.

With funds from his Fesler-Lampert Award, Tom Rose (art) continued work on "School Stories" with collaborator Bryant Griffith. Through texts and images, video and audio, the project explores how men understand the culture(s) into which they are inducted through the early educational process.

With the help of nearly $30,000 from the Grotto Foundation, Patricia Albers and the Department of American Indian Studies are developing programs to preserve Dakota and Ojibwe culture and languages. "Once we stop speaking our language, we are no longer Ojibwe, but rather, only descendants of Ojibwe,” says Earl Nyholm, an Ojibwe elder.

With a three-year grant of nearly $5 million from the U.S. Department of Education, Andrew Cohen (Linguistics, ESL, and Slavic Languages and Literatures/ILES) and his partner Michael Page are helping increase awareness of the complex connections between language and culture.

Working with the Institute for New Media Studies, Jamie Druckman (political science) introduced students in his seminar "Campaign 2002" to what he says is a largely unexplored area of election campaign research— how political candidates use the Internet in their campaigns.

Nora Paul, director, Institute for New Media Studies, landed a CLA grant to develop The Wall, a presentation technology that displays interactive three-dimensional content. Visit the website.