Congratulations to Professors Fladd, Goldfarb and Sauther who were all awarded a Research & Innovation (RIO) Seed Grant Program. The RIO Seed Grants are specifically aimed to stimulate inter- and multidisciplinary work on research, scholarship and creative activity projects that either: explore new areas of research with high impact and future funding potential, or pursue research, scholarship, or creative activity of high impact to arts and humanities disciplines. See below to learn more about each professor's project.
Samantha Fladd
Professor Fladd's grant will help to fund hosting a symposium at Boulder next year discussing "Indigenous Ontologies and Digital Materialities," specifically how to ethically move forward with Indigenous communities on the use digital technologies such as 3D scanning and printing given potentially differing understandings of the materiality of items. It includes several collaborators from our department, Jen Shannon, Will Taylor, Scott Ortman, and Alyssa Bader, as well as some museum colleagues.
Kathryn Goldfarb
Professor Goldfarb's grant was co-authored with Arielle Milkman and the funding is to support her PhD research on (im)migrant wildland firefighters in the American West. She had been funded already to do the qualitative work by an NSF DDRIG, and we have been working on a collaboration with atmospheric scientists at CIRES/ NOAA to layer real-time air quality monitoring in extreme wildfire contexts on top of Arielle's qualitative data (and in consultation with Jonathan Skinner-Thompson at the Law School and Colleen Reid in Geography). These measurements would provide a lot more information about the toxic exposures firefighters are experiencing, and will hopefully also be used by the NOAA chemical sciences lab and potentially the National Weather Service to better understand the divergences between generalized air quality predictions vs actual air quality in the intense contexts of wildfires. It really is due to the awesomeness of Arielle's research that this project has such great legs so she deserves major recognition for this collaboration!
Michelle Sauther
Professor Sauther will be collaborating with an engineering professor in the development of a new animal tracking system for small, nocturnal primates. The funds will also support Bio Anth grad student Jack Dalton, and an engineering grad student.