The following faculty members received funding awards in fall 2014 through the College’s Faculty Research Award Program (FRAP), which supports the research activities of all regular full- and part-time tenured and tenure-track Amherst College faculty members. Since 2000, FRAP has been endowed by the H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life.
SMALL GRANT AWARDS
Small grants are for $6,000 or less.
Title: Building Collaborations for Studying Connectivity in the Circadian Clock
Our circadian clocks regulate most of our internal processes, including sleep, metabolism, immune function, and cognitive alertness. Human health in general appears to require a fully functioning circadian clock, motivating the study of how the clock works and how to prevent clock dysfunction that may contribute to health problems. Professor Leise, a mathematician, works with neuroscientists to develop new experimental approaches and mathematical analyses to deepen our understanding of the circadian clock. She is currently building collaborations focusing on revealing connectivity at different levels in the circadian system: between neurons in the master pacemaker, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), between the molecular clock mechanism and signaling pathways inside each SCN neuron, and between the SCN and rhythms of activity, body temperature, and metabolism. Her FRAP grant will support travel that will facilitate both new and ongoing collaborations with circadian clock experimentalists.
Title: Workshop Performance of The Scarlet Professor
The Scarlet Professor, a new opera by composer Eric Sawyer and librettist Harley Erdman, is based on the true story of Newton Arvin, a nationally renowned literary critic and English professor at Smith College who was arrested in 1960 for possessing “beefcake” pornography. This opera examines this moment through the character of Arvin, the subject of Barry Werth’s compelling and widely acclaimed biography. The erstwhile setting is Northampton Massachusetts State Hospital, where Arvin retreats from the world as public scandal envelops his name, but the true milieu of the opera is the inner landscape of Arvin’s mind, where flashbacks from his past, glimpses of his trial, and episodes from The Scarlet Letter collapse, collide, and explode in musical and theatrical color. The FRAP grant will support a public workshop performance of the opera’s first half, comprising the first five scenes, to be presented in Buckley Recital Hall during spring 2015, with a cast of professional singers from the New England region.
LARGE GRANT AWARDS
Large grants are for more than $6,000 and up to $30,000.
Title: Evaluating the contributions of electrostatics, steric effects, and dispersion to intermolecular interactions
Previous comparisons among structures of related protic acid-fluoroethylene complexes allowed the determination of the contributions of electrostatic interactions and steric effects to intermolecular interactions. Professor Leung’s research, an extension to ethylene molecules substituted with chlorine in place of, or in addition to, fluorine and comparisons to complexes containing an argon atom, will probe the importance of dispersion interactions in species with larger numbers of electrons. Gross differences in the mode of binding as well as subtle changes in geometric parameters can be used to characterize the forces contributing to complex formation.
Title: A laser ablation source for a chirped pulse Fourier transform microwave spectrometer applied to catalytically relevant systems
A laser ablation source will be installed in the Amherst College chirped pulse Fourier transform microwave spectrometer to enable the study of metal containing complexes, which will be used as models to probe metal-adsorbate interactions important in catalytic systems. Work supported by the FRAP grant will connect previous results using helium nanodroplet spectroscopy to predictions from quantum chemistry and characterize olefin-tin interactions important to the Stille reaction.
Title: Resonant Geographies
Resonant Geographies is a sixty-five minute album-length musical composition comprising seven individual movements. The piece is arranged and orchestrated for performance by an expanded eleven-piece version of Jason Robinson’s Janus Ensemble. Both as a whole and in each movement, the piece acts as a meditation on the relationship between geography and personal history, structure and expression. Drawn from personal experiences and evoking the emotional ephemera of specific places, the titles of each movement reference dates and physical locations in California and Massachusetts, thus serving as a partial autobiographical sound map of the composer’s experiences. Professor Robinson’s previous compositions for the Janus Ensemble (from the albums Tiresian Symmetry [2012] and The Two Faces of Janus [2010]) favor symmetrical and asymmetrical numerical relationships, and draw from such relationships to create complex melodic and harmonic structures that both exploit the unique instrumentation of the group and offer novel contexts for individual and collective improvisation. As a whole, Resonant Geographies eschews such strict adherence to numerical relationships and instead relies more on the inspiration of melody, the feelings and memories of times and places, the emotional resonances of physical and metaphorical geographies. Still deeply indebted to the compositional influences of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and more contemporary composer-improvisers, Resonant Geographies combines meticulously crafted compositional passages that feature the unique instrumentation of the group with improvisatory sections that encourage each individual within the group to imagine their relationships to memory and collectivity.
Title: The Dora Project
Professor Woodson will spend five months in Australia to research, rehearse, and present a new full-length multimedia performance piece titled Dora. This new work, developed in collaboration with Australian colleagues, extends Professor Woodson’s creative research on place and belonging. Dora will premiere at the LaMaMa Theater in Melbourne, Australia, and then be presented in Amherst and New York.