Medical research collaborations, studies of African demography reap Einaudi grants

Projects that address medical research collaborations between Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) and a medical college in Brazil and new strategies for monitoring demographic changes in sub-Saharan Africa were among the spring 2011 winners of Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies seed and small grants.

The four seed grants and four small grants were awarded to promote research on foreign policy and international development as well as international studies in general. Selections were also based on project potential to promote research by junior faculty, generate additional external funding and benefit international studies at Cornell. The seed grant program is designed to provide support for the preparation of external funding requests, while the small grant program supports international studies events.

Winners of the seed grant competition are:

  • Garrick Blalock, applied economics and management; Thomas Pepinsky, government; Pamela Baxter, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research; and Eric Tagliacozzo, history: $10,400 to hold a small conference in late summer 2011 to discuss collaboration with Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), Indonesia. The project seeks to marry BPS' economic, agricultural and demographic data with Cornell's expertise in secure data management to create a data library.
  • Madelon Finkel and Audrey Schuetz, public health, WCMC: $3,600 to establish a long-term relationship between the medical college and Botuatu College of Medicine at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil.
  • Janice Kanemitsu, Asian studies: $6,000 to study two 18th Century Japanese kabuki puppet plays, and to analyze the intersections between theatrical representations of women in these period pieces and notions of proper female conduct.
  • Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue and Thomas Hirschl, development sociology: $6,000 to organize an international conference and a training workshop this summer in sub-Saharan Africa. These activities are designed to build research capacity in demographic analysis throughout Francophone Africa, a region that has been marginalized in past U.S. outreach and training efforts due to language barriers.

The winners of small grant awards include:

  • Durba Ghosh, history, and Neema Kudva, city and regional planning: $2,000 to hold a symposium last April that brought together campus groups working on water management and climate change in South Asia; it is hoped that discussions may lead to plans for future projects in the Indian subcontinent.
  • Camille Robcis, history: $2,500 to provide an intellectual history of "institutional psychotherapy," a French movement by a group of avant-garde doctors who were appalled by the conditions of psychiatric care during World War II.
  • Lily Chi, architecture, and Jeremy Foster, landscape architecture: $4,000 to organize a conference on such informal aspects of cities as groupings of "self-built architectures" and "nomadic and temporal spatial formations."
  • Stuart Hart, Mark Milstein, Xiaojian You and Qilu Yu, Johnson's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise: $3,000 for the Third China Entrepreneur Forum to be held at Cornell Sept. 30-Oct. 11 to bring together multidisciplinary researchers to enhance Cornell's research capacity on Chinese and international studies, including social innovation, entrepreneurship and sustainability.

Applications for the next biannual small and seed grants are due Sept. 15. Information: http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/funding/seed.asp.

 

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